Marranos on the Moradas: Secret Jews and Penitentes in the Southwestern United States from 1590 to 1890 9781618110329

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MARRANOS ON THE MORADAS

JUDAISM AND JEWISH LIFE

EDITORIAL BOARD Geoffrey Alderman (University of Buckingham, Great Britain) Herbert Basser (Queens University, Canada) Donatella Ester Di Cesare (Università “La Sapienza,” Italy) Roberta Rosenberg Farber (Yeshiva University, New York), Series Editor Associate Simcha Fishbane (Touro College, New York), Series Editor Meir Bar Ilan (Bar Ilan University, Israel) Andreas Nachama (Touro College, Berlin) Ira Robinson (Concordia University, Montreal) Nissan Rubin (Bar Ilan University, Israel) Susan Starr Sered (Suffolk University, Boston) Reeva Spector Simon (Yeshiva University, New York)

MARRANOS ON THE MORADAS

SECRET JEWS AND PENITENTES IN THE SOUTHWESTERN UNITED STATES FROM 1590 TO 1890 NORMAN SIMMS

Boston 2009

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Simms, Norman Toby. Marranos on the moradas : secret Jews and Penitentes in the southwestern United States, from 1590 to 1890 / Norman Simms. p. cm. — (Judaism and Jewish life) ISBN 978-1-934843-32-1 1. Marranos — Southwest, New — History. 2. Jews — Southwest, New — History. 3. Marranos — Southwest, New — Religious life. 4. Marranos — Southwest, New — Social life and customs. 5. Hermanos Penitentes — Southwest, New — History. 6. Hermanos Penitentes — Southwest, New — Religion. 7. Southwest, New — Religious life and customs. I. Title. F790.J5S56 2008 979'.004924 — dc22 2008052933

Photographs and drawings by permission from the private collection of Ruben E. Archuleta. Line drawings by John P. Ercul made them for Ruben E. Archuleta’s Land of the Penitentes and Eppie Archuleta and the Tale of Juan de la Burra, reproduced courtesy of El Jefe, R. E. Archuleta Copyright © 2009 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-934843-32-1 Book design by Yuri Alexandrov Published by Academic Studies Press in 2009 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Marranos on the Moradas

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Theoretical Problem of the Penitentes . . . . . . . . . . . The Problem Slowly Expands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Outline of this Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . More Theoretical and Methodological Problems . . . . . . . Incidentalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A New Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Distinctions: Marranos, Crypto-Jews and Pseudo-Jews New Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Artistic/Aesthetic View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Rhetorical/Dramatic View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Psychological View/Psychohistory . . . . . . . . . . . . Post-Post-Modernism: Microhistory . . . . . . . . . . . . . Post-Colonialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Feminist and Gay Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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C h a p t e r I. WHAT DID THE PENITENTES REALLY DO? . . . Medieval Flagellants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Third Order of Franciscans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aztec, Mexican, Pueblo, Shamanistic Rites and Secret Societies among Native Americans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Further Speculation: or, A Shot in the Dark . . . . . . . . . . Ghosts, Demons and Marranos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marranism as a Way of Doubt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Four New Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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C h a p t e r II. MARRANOS, PENITENTES, AND THE BAROQUE ANAMORPHOSES IN ACTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 The Fourth Influence: Marranos and Crypto-Jews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Marrano Testimonies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 v

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A New Overview of Penitentes and Marranos in the New World . . . . . . . . . 110 The Problem of Marrano Tradition and Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Simulation and Dissimulation in Europe during the Period of the Baroque . . . 124 C h a p t e r III. THE MACHINERY OF SECRETS AND THE MACHINATIONS OF SILENCE: CONSPIRACIES, CONTRAPTIONS AND LUDIBRIA . . . . Spaceless Space and Timeless Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Models of Behavior and Social Deception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Familiares, Malsines and Polillios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Alternative Counter-Contraptions of the Ramban, a new Kabbalah and the so-called Grandees of French Jewry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Una Fiesta de Sangre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Confusion and Discombobulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Passion’s Ludibrium Midrashed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Machines, Apparatus and Contraptions: Instruction, Construction and Destruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ludibrium: a machine to see and feel insults . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bricolage, Jonglerie and other Gadgets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tikkun ha-olam, ha-nefesh, ha-goof, ha-shem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Contraption that Failed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C h a p t e r IV. CROSSCURRENTS AND UNDERCURRENTS . . . . . . . . . . Section 1. The Half-Way Markers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Penitentes, Thaipusam, and the Fillipino Crucifiers: Ecstasy, Agony and Their Social and Psychological Significance as Festivals of Blood and Pain . . . Thaipusam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Filipino Flagellants and Self-Crucifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Penitentes of the Southwestern United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Enargeia versus energeia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Religions of the Father and of the Son . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Argument thus Far . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Section 2. A Survey of Fuzzy Jews in Colonial America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concealing, Preserving and Reshaping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wachtel’s Sensitive Study of Souvenirs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Zeugma and the Marrano Complex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Crypto-Jews and Marranos in Portuguese America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Toleration to Expulsion in the French Zones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jews in Dutch America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Brokers of the World” in a Broken and Baroque World . . . . . . . . . . . . . C h a p t e r V. PENITENTES AND THE CRAZY THINGS THEY DO: OR, HOW TO BE JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN AT THE SAME TIME . Two Ways of Being Jewish in a Non-Jewish World . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rambam vs Ramban: Who Won the Debates? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Apparent and the Concealed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

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279 284 287 289

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The Sacred and the Secret . . . . . . . What Happened to Yemen . . . . . . . The Metamorphosis of Old Sepharad A Heritage of Guilt . . . . . . . . . . . The Mean Son’s Question . . . . . . .

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C h a p t e r VI. FESTIVALS OF BLOOD HERE AND BLOODY TRIALS THERE: PLAYING ROLES AND ROLLING ALONG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Rhetoric of Blood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Multiple Personalities, Careers and Strategies of Dissimulation . . . . . . . . . . Penitence and Piety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Making History out of Midrash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historicity, Hysteria and Histrionics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dormant Memories and Midrashim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

329 331 339 359 360 368 375

C h a p t e r VII. REACHING TOWARDS A CONCLUSION AND SOME NEW QUESTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In Search of the Bizarre and the Uncanny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The World Beneath the Surface of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Delusion, Child’s Play, or Enargeia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Troubled Children of the New World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Delusions in the New World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children’s Games and Delusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children among the Marranos: A Psychohistorical Problem . . . . . . . . Incomplete Mourning and Unresolved Grief: Marranos and Crypto-Jews in Exile on the Moradas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Clinical Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Synthetic Approach Needed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Components of the New Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Midrashing Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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C h a p t e r VIII. EPILOGUE . . . . . . . . . . Meditations and Speculations . . . . . . . . Midrash or Mishmosh? . . . . . . . . . . . Habits of Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paradigms for Jews in a Non-Jewish World Midrashing the Midrash . . . . . . . . . . . Mythos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 501

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“I go where I shall not return . . . ” — The Book of Job

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In grateful appreciation to Ruben E. Archuleta and José Faur

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INTRODUCTION Just as a man lies when he signifies by word that which he is not, yet lies not when he refrains from saying what he is, for this is sometimes lawful; so also does a man dissemble, when by outward signs of deeds or things he signifies that which he is not, yet he dissembles not if he omits to signify what he is. Hence one may hide one’s sin without being guilty of dissimulation. It is thus that we must understand the saying of Jerome on the words of Isaias 3:9, that the “second remedy after shipwreck is to hide one’s sin,” lest, to wit, others be scandalized thereby. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Secunda Partis, Question 111. Dissimulation and Hypocrisy, Article 1. Whether all dissimulation is a sin?1

The first thing I was asked when I tried to show the working manuscript of this book to friends and colleagues was: What is it all about? After a few words, they interrupted: How can you put together Jewish history and Christian folklore? Then, when they glanced at the Contents page or opened a few pages here and there, the question became: You don’t believe all that nonsense about secret Jews and underground cities, do you? Did this discourage me? Not at all. I became more determined than ever to drive through to the end.2 Now that it is finished, I can answer those questions by saying: In a sense, everything this book is based on can be summed up in this way: The century 1470–1570 . . . witnessed the near-destruction of Jewish religion, learning, and life in western and central Europe. Open allegiance to Judaism was now entirely extinguished in Spain, Portugal, Italy south of Rome, the Netherlands, and Provence outside the Papal territories of Avignon and the Contat Venaissin.3 And in Germany and Italy, where the last remnants persisted, Jewish life had suffered a dramatic contraction.4 1

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Kevin Knight, ed., The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, second and revised edition, 1920, literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Online Edition (2006) http://academic2.american.edu/~dfagel/summatheologicaconcise.pdf (Seen 16/05/2007). Did these questions really come up? Alas, no. This is my dream that someday there will be colleagues and friends who will be interested enough for me to approach and humbly request that they read over what I have written. For more information on these papal domaines and their Jewish inhabitants, see JeanClaude Cohen, “Les communautés juives d’Avignon et du Comtat Venaissin au xviiie siècle: ‘Les Juifs du Pape’ ” online at file://a:lamedicinehebraique (Seen 2/11/2003). Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991 [1985]) p. 23.

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This looks like the nadir of Jewish history: there seemed to be no future, no room to wriggle and no place to hide. The much-vaunted Golden Age in alAndalus moreover was far more limited in space and time than its admirers like to admit and was pockmarked by periods of intolerance, persecution and expulsion.5 On the other hand, despite the dreary picture painted by Jonathan I. Israel, there were three factors which we want to consider, that is, putting to the side the circumstances of Ashkenazi Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, and the survival of Oriental Jewry in tiny pockets of Palestine, Yemen, India, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and in the heart of the Sahara Desert. 1. The Sephardic Diaspora, which Armistad calls “a gradual, ongoing process,”6 rather than a sudden spurting forth of people, over many generations sent out hundreds of thousands of Jews from Spain and Portugal and these people stimulated the communities through which they passed and into which they settled, thus giving a new beginning out of all this turmoil and suffering. 2. Not all the Jews who entered into the Christian fold through forced and voluntary conversions were completely lost to their ancestral faith, but there now came into play a new kind of dynamic in Jewish history, that of secret and confused Jewishness. 3. Even when those New Christians, as they were called, did not seek to return to Judaism by escaping from the Lands of Idolatry or through Kiddush haShem (Sanctification of the Name, i.e., martyrdom) in the hands of the Inquisition, they brought to the rest of Christian Europe, including the kingdoms of Iberia and their imperial territories overseas, a new kind of religious and artistic thinking. This book is mostly about the kind of men and women who fit into the second two of the above categories. In particular, it is about a very small number of former Jews who found themselves on the very northernmost fringes of the Spanish Empire and among isolated clusters of Mexicans who formed small brotherhoods of Catholic worshippers called Penitentes, groups for many generations seemingly abandoned by Mother Church, thrown back on to their own 5

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As witness the conversion under duress of Maimonides’ own family and their escape to Muslim lands in North Africa and Egypt, where, instead of peace and harmony with the Islamic society, he and other Jews lived in Dhimmitude, a condition worse than secondhand citizenship since life and any modicum of religious or social rights was always circumscribed by legal debilities and bigotry. See for instance John D. Brolley’s review of The Cambridge Genizah Collections: Their Contents and Significance (Cambridge University Library Genizah Series I), ed. Stefan C. Reif (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) in HJ Newsletter on line at [email protected] (1/04/2004). Samuel G. Armistead, “Oral Literature of the Sephardic Jews” online at http://flsj.ucdacis. edu/home/sjjs/orallit/litorale (Seen 11/01/2002).

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devices, and creating from memory and reduced resources a mode of penitential devotion that seemed to the outside world for a very long time bizarre, heretical and evil. Why should there be such harsh and frightful terms used? Who were they and how could confused and secret Jews take part — perhaps a foundational part — in their rituals?

THE THEORETICAL PROBLEM OF THE PENITENTES No sect or organization in the Southwest has stirred as much controversy as the order of Los Hermanos Penitentes. Conger Beasley7

This is a book about two apparently incongruous groups of people living today in the south-western United States, with virtually impossible to reconcile beliefs: the Penitentes and the Marranos. The first group is a Roman Catholic brotherhood that perform bloody forms of disciplinary rituals as part of their year-long communal service. The second is an amorphous, mostly secret group of men and women whose ancestors were once Jews but were converted, forced or voluntarily, four to five hundred years ago and now they wish — or at least a small number of their descendants wish — to be still inheritors of the Jewish tradition. Usually, the identity of a people is fairly easy to ascertain: they are either this or that, and occasionally they can have a choice. But with these two groups the problem is far from clear. In a sense, they are neither fish nor fowl, neither Jews nor Christian in any strict sense of the terms. On the one hand, the Christian members of the brotherhood probably do not know there are any former Jews in their midst who still think of themselves as Jewish, or if they do it is of no concern to them, so long as the members all obey the rules of the order and maintain the beliefs and practices of their tradition. On the other, the people claiming to be anousim (forced converts) are not recognized as Jews by the outside world and feel aggrieved because their Sephardic identity does not allow them to be accepted by most rabbinical authorities. While the issues of their current status and the validity of their beliefs deserve respectful concern, this book is about something else. That something else is bound up with the mostly undeserved negative views most historians, as well as the general public, have had about the Penitentes. It is something that cannot be said easily in a single statement or even in a short paragraph or two, and that it why this 7

Conger Beasley, “Among the Penitentes: Remembering an ancient Holy Week Tradition in Southern Colorado” CSIndy (20 April-26 April 2000) online at http://www.csindy.com/ csindy/2000-04-20/cover.

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book is so long and why it has been so difficult to write. To make the statement we eventually will be able to make, tentative as it still may be, we must sketch in a lot of history, define or redefine many words and concepts, and set up a series of contexts which are usually not seen as relevant to this problem.

THE PROBLEM SLOWLY EXPANDS . . . y después, en ella [la comunidad], sabe el Señor, y lo sabe en el mundo quien sólo lo debió saber, lo que intenté en orden a esconder mi nombre, y que no me lo permitió, diciendo que era tentación; y sí seria. And later, in that community [of nuns], the Lord knows — and, in the world, only the one who must know — how diligently I sought to obscure my name, and how this was not permitted, saying it was temptation: and so it would have been.8

The problem as we first set it forth cannot grasp all the complications that must be attended to in regard to two kinds of groups of people with two kinds of cultural and historical backgrounds, both of whom, to some degree or other, were forced to hide their identities, their beliefs, and practices; and who, each time they ventured out to claim their rightful place in the sun, mistakenly thinking the dangers had passed, discovered that it was not yet safe — and who then went back into hiding. Most scholarship agrees that such bizarre conditions did indeed obtain in Europe during the period known as the Baroque, but to prove that a similar situation not only also existed in the northern parts of Old Mexico right through to the time when the United States took over sovereignty of what was from then on New Mexico and parts of other south-western territories, but right through to our own day, that is not always accepted by scholars or the general public. Ever since the region came under the control of the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century, the south-western territories of New Mexico, parts of Arizona and southern Colorado have been fascinating to the rest of America, especially to so-called Anglos — non-Catholics, for the most part, and immigrants from central and northern Europe, and Americans from the East moving out to the new territories — could not get enough information about this 8

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “Response to the Most Illustrious Poetess Sor Filotea de la Cruz” in Selected Writing: Poems, Protest and a Dream, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Penguin Books, 1997) pp. 12–13. That Sor Juana (1648–1695) was a Marrana will be discussed later in this book.

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bizarre and barbaric people. The uncanny customs of these so-called “primitive” and “savage” folk continued to draw the attention of the rest of the country right through the first half of the twentieth century. In films, magazine articles and travel books, the controversy seemed to focus on the bloody and violent rituals performed by the members of this secret brotherhood in their Easter or Holy Week celebrations. Racism, religious bigotry, and the need to justify the greed for the land where the Penitentes lived and kept their sheep were certainly part of the phenomenon. But there is more to this fascination and not all of it is negative or condescending. Anthropologists, folklorists, historians of religion and art, along with tourists and hippies also found — and still find — the Brotherhood a deep source of interest, even if not always properly understood. With all the good will in the world, however, many of these recent visitors, searching for the exotic and the romantic, have little understanding of the people and the customs they come to glare at. After a century and a half, at least since the concession of Mexico’s northern-most territory, when the small farmers and craftsmen of Hispanic origin found themselves isolated and vulnerable to the encroachment of land-hungry settlers, aggressive missionaries, and curiosityseeking anthropologists, the brothers in the Penitente movement sought ways to avoid being the centre of attention. For a much longer period of time, perhaps as far back as Mexico’s independence from Spain in the 1820s — or even longer — the individuals and families who came to live in these northern parts of Nueva España deliberately chose to keep their religious lives a secret. Their reasons were varied, but above all it was due to a desire to evade the Inquisition and its agents9. We shall have to examine, therefore, certain aspects 9

There are two kinds of resistance to any discussion of the Inquisition in histories of the Penitentes, New Mexico, or even Mexico. On one side, there are those take the view that the Holy Office was not as bad as it was made out to be by “Lutheran” (that is, Protestant) proponents of the “Black Legend” of Spanish colonialism or Romantic and Gothic novelists who revelled in its secret and mysterious dungeons, torture chambers and mad inquisitors; these days these revisionist historians argue that all European judicial systems used torture and its threat as legitimate tools of investigation, and that, when you add up the numbers actually burned at the stake, sent to the galleys, or humiliated for life and deprived of their wealth, titles and public offices, those lists are modest or low by the standards of later persecutory regimes. An example can be found in the popular history by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2005), where the author states “we now know that the Inquisition was not nearly as harsh as previously portrayed, and that the number of people brought before it was far smaller — by orders of magnitude — than the exaggerated accounts that were once accepted”(p. 2). It is as though terror sustained over five centuries from one end of the world to the other could be blandly put aside with such empty terms as “not nearly as harsh” and orders of magnitude”. On the other side, there is what I will discuss as Incidentalism, the view that the Inquisition was only a minor irritant, with little or no influence on the course of European and Latin American history; like the first form of denial, this simply whitewashes — almost washes away — all references, as we see, for

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INTRODUCTION

of these earliest settlers’ backgrounds in order to understand why they, more than most Mexicans or Spaniards, would feel this compulsion for secrecy. It will be found that they were, for the most part, different in kind from most of the immigrants from the Old World to the New, whether in Mexico or in the rest of Latin America, and that it was precisely the reasons scholars normally adduce as evidence of historical factors creating specific characteristics of the social environment that these settlers chose to live under — not just distance and isolation from the main centres of commercial, religious and political activity in New Spain. That this northern region should have been without adequate numbers of priests and friars, government agents and mercantile contacts would seem to have been a debility, something that at once was to be avoided if possible and when not, the cause for poverty, ignorance and despair. And yet, as I shall try to explain, this was just the kind of place these men and women chose to live, and when strangers came these people tried to hide their way of life and their way of worship. Today, while the art collectors and grandchildren of the Penitentes lament their gradual disappearance, with fewer and fewer young men willing to join in the rituals and responsibilities of the Hermandad, the old men (and some women) find themselves forced to break a long-standing pact of silence to explain the “true” nature of the movement. Rather than dwelling on the spectacular and bloody customs, the hermanos ask outsiders to look at their group as a communal order, more concerned with caring for the health, welfare and integrity of one another, as well as the mutual care for each other’s spiritual well-being. For they are, after all, and above all other things, a religious fraternity — a Roman Catholic sodality in the Mexican tradition. That being said — and in no way do I intend in this book to undermine the credibility of these pious old men or cast aspersions on their fathers and grandfathers before them — the Penitentes do not fit easily into religious or art history, and their origins and development show peculiar traits that cannot be easily rationalized away without stressing the very bloody rites that seem to have brought them into disrepute throughout most of their existence. Furthermore, as the very title of my book indicates, one of the most peculiar and bizarre aspects of the Hermandad appears to be something most if not all the brothers would deny, and that is its formative relationship with Crypto-Jews and Marranos. As I will show in later chapters, this aspect of the phenomenon became known to me when I started reading a series of interviews instance in William Wroth, Images of Penance, Images of Mercy: Southwestern Santos in the Late Nineteenth Century (Colorado Springs, CO: Taylor Museum for Southwestern Studies and Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991) wherein both Wroth’s own preliminary background studies and Marta Weigle’s Introduction to the second part study of the santos created and used in the region, there is barely one fleeting reference to the Inquisition. Similarly, by the way, in all the chapters of this book there is just one casual “incidental” mention of Jews.

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INTRODUCTION

with men and women among the Hispanics of southern Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona who claimed that their parents and grandparents were members of the Penitentes. So, if it is controversial enough today to take seriously these people’s claims to a Sephardic history hidden for more than four hundred years from the civil and ecclesiastical authorities in Mexico (or before that in New Spain, as it was known), how much more so to argue that they were also at the very heart of one of the most so-called regressive versions of Catholicism, the Brotherhood of Our Father Jesus the Nazarine?

OUTLINE OF THIS BOOK Although mixing light seems simple on the surface, it can be really confusing. Some people dispute whether the things you see on the screen really represent shadows or not.10

In order to answer this big question about who and what, as well as why and how, in the matter of the Penitentes and the Marranos, we need to step back and look at several preliminary problems. Rather than the usual programme of study based on folklore, anthropology, and local history, this book will draw on other, more analytic skills, such as rhetoric, rabbinics, psychohistory and philology. We have to look, as José Faur says, “in the shadows of history,”11 but even then, the question of what constitutes a shadow is not easy, and the mixture of light and darkness (tinieblas)12 gives more than chiaroscuro because different kinds of light — different intensities, length of rays, and combinations from diverse angles — intersect, overlap, and mix in a variety of ways. Chapter One, “Marranos, Penitentes, and the Baroque,” will confront head-on the challenges that have been raised by scholars who speak in sympathy for a large number of Hispanics in the American southwest claiming to be the children of anousim, conversos, nuevos cristianos and/or criptojudios. For the most part these historians avoid what they call “the M word,” as Marrano is taken as an odious term of abuse in Spanish — a new born piglet covered in slime or the female genitalia. Later, we will go over the charges leveled against the argument that these individuals and families truly are of Sephardic descent 10

11

12

Anonymous, “The Science of Light: Colored Shadows Background” Teachers’ Lab: The Annenberg/CPB Math and Science Project online at [email protected] (Seen 30 January 2007). José Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (New York: SUNY Press, 1992). A key term in the hymns of the Penitentes.

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INTRODUCTION

and therefore may rightfully ask to be recognized for what they are: Jews who have had their faith tested for hundreds of years and come out of this long ordeal, in a sense a Holocaust of half a millennium, as survivors. While a few ask to be taken back into the Jewish fold with the same rituals as any other returning Jew or baal teshuva, rather than going through a process of conversion as though they and their ancestors had stopped being Jews and were in essence Christians, most seek understanding and sympathy for themselves and their ancestors; that is, they wish to be accepted as the progeny of a proud people who endured great hardships, persecuted by the Inquisition, stigmatized by the Estatus de sangre limpieza, Statutes of Purity of Blood, and treated unfairly by neighbors and civil officials. A few seek a somewhat precariously balanced middle position — to be Christian-Jews, persons who call themselves Sephardim but who worship in a church in a mixed messianic Christian and vaguely Hebrew service. Variously among this group of Hispanics there are some — whether already halachically converted or self-proclaimed Jews, believing Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, and messianic would-be Christian-Jews — speak in interviews of their parents or grandparents as members of the Hermandad de Penitentes. The arguments against these claims to Jewishness, with its various implications, are objections by rabbis of several persuasions, local historians, and investigating journalists. This is a very different kind of persecution than the New Christians have faced from Catholic society but it is no less humiliating and painful. It is does not involve threats to life and limb or financial well being. It does insult the individuals and families in the present who make these claims, questioning their sincerity and integrity, and it abuses the memory of their ancestors and the hardships they put up with generation after generation. The rabbinical objections, mostly from Orthodox and Conservative circles, are based on the halachic and historical grounds that too many generations have passed and too much blood has been mixed for there to be any clear continuity of Jewish belief or practice. Even sympathetic rabbis tend to take the position that it is better to be safe than sorry, and that if anyone wants to rejoin the Jewish community they should not object to a formal conversion. Unfortunately, this objection often up until very recently rested on ignorance: the Jewish authorities either were so immersed in their own Ashkenazic culture and history that they could not recognize the special circumstances of Sephardic tradition and the covert ways in which Jewish law and custom could be passed down generation after generation for close to five hundred years; or, suspicious of the few claimants who tried to rationalize their identity-claims by participation in messianic cults, the guardians of halachic purity seem unable to appreciate the sincerity of the wishes for a return to Judaism or the legitimacy of the grounds on which those claims are made — often failing to see that for a people who 8

INTRODUCTION

have maintained their adherence to Judaism, no matter how fragmented and distorted it may seem in certain details, it nonetheless represents a remarkable feat of cultural integrity. The historians, sociologists, anthropologists and folklorists who register their objections again seem to generalize from a few instances of over-zealous claims and an unsystematic reliance on questionable details. For instance they question the resemblance of church noise-makers used in Tinieblas ceremonies with groggas (hand-held noise-makers) found in Purim festivals, the appearance of six-pointed stars in sacred images or on Christian grave stones as supposed indicators of Jewish origins, or other customs and objects looked at out of context altogether or in the wrong (that is, Ashkenazi-American) context. However, food purity, hygiene regulations, and domestic architecture are often the clearest and most necessary markers of halachic rule. It is not that these specifics are not possibly creditable in an over-all argument: they are important because food preparation and service, cleanliness of the body and the home, and performance of ethical deeds in relation to family, friends and associates are central to rabbinic laws and customs. Judaism, in this halachic sense, is less a faith than a way of life, a way of leading a holy, sanctifying life. The logical point at issue, then, is that these health and culinary customs cannot be seen as random or trivial details or evaluated on the basis of superficial similarities or functional analogies to other cultures. Journalists often seek to describe controversies in “common sense” ways and thus misrepresent the complex analyses that historical and social phenomena demand. What strikes such media reporters as “newsworthy” is the unexpected, that is, the continuance of Judaizing tendencies over long periods of time. The news people also focus on the sudden and thus shockingly unexpected emergence of a large number of voices claiming a Jewish identity in the midst of what would seem the most least likely of places — Hispanic communities in New Mexico, Texas, Arizona and southern Colorado — and then, added to this, the objections by supposedly authoritative religious leaders and professional scholars to these claims. With limited time and space to give to these stories and the need to “grab” the readers’ attention, popular writers are not able to be sensitive to the most crucial aspects of the claims for recognition and acceptance. Such sensitivity would make the reporters investigate the ways in which New Christians have learned through bitter experience over many centuries to keep their real identities a secret, to simulate and dissimulate, to deflect and mute criticism by a number of subtle and cunning strategies. From this other kind of approach, they would learn to listen to what the men and women are really saying: that they are descendants of anousim — not conversos themselves. The journalists should prepare themselves to speak of families that have hidden their true identities for centuries for reasons that were real and still are, and therefore who are usually unsure and confused about what it means to be a Jew in the sense of mainstream 9

INTRODUCTION

American — that is, usually Ashkenazic — belief and practice. These claimants also do not always want to return to Judaism of one sort or another, but to gain recognition for the richness of their past, respect for their ancestors who endured great suffering, and sympathy for their current confusions. Then in Chapter Two I examine the commonly held view of the Penitentes as a performers of an extremely bloody ritual of self-crucifixion and to see it as the defining act of the brotherhood, all other facets of its spiritual, social and psychological developments being ways of protecting and rationalizing this act of ecstatic insanity. In this chapter, too, I want to examine the phenomena associated with the ritual performances of the Penitentes with rhetorical schemes developed in Christian discourses and art to envision, imagine and conceptualise the Passion of Jesus, with the iconography developed in Spain, Mexico, and these south-western American territories, and with various modes of theatricality, such as late medieval Passion plays, moralities, and declamatory drama and tableaux vivants. Chapter Three will look at the historical development of the movement, including discussions of who the original settlers were and where they came from, why they chose to keep moving away from places with increasingly sophisticated civil and religious structures and successful and progressive financial activities. This means reassessing certain aspects of Sephardic history associated with the founding of the Inquisition, the development of CryptoJewishness, and the aesthetic articulation of these themes overtly, covertly and unconsciously. This will also allow for a study of the auto-da-fe in terms of its theatricality and its mythical qualities of a public dreaming — albeit a nightmare vision collectively experienced; the interrogations and tortures used by the Holy Office as forms of dialogue, debate, and ludic (playful and/or symbolic) combat; and the many strategies and techniques created by conversos in anticipation of the ordeal inexorably approaching their lives, the methods used by those denounced and arrested to communicate between themselves and manipulate the actions of the inquisitors; and decisions taken to counterattack, such as seeking to draw forth from interrogators and instructors lessons about Judaism otherwise suppressed in Iberian society, to challenge and convert the inquisitors themselves, and to put themselves on display in public during the final procession to the place of execution and rituals at the stake. At that point, in Chapter Four, with a growing body of inferential and speculative evidence that the region was disproportionately peopled by individuals and families of converso background, I want to deal with some of the theoretical points relevant to the study of New Christians as anousim (forced converts), Crypto-Jews (strategically voluntary converts) and Marranos (confused or vacillating converts). In fact, it will be necessary to make quite a few very nice distinctions here, many more than are usually allowed for; in fact, most scholarship seems to elide these three terms into a single concept with 10

INTRODUCTION

three variant names. These new categories of thought based on such distinctions in nomenclature will break apart the rigid paradigms usually found in histories of the Inquisition and the plight of New Christians. Perhaps most important of all will be the fissuring of the distinction between Jew and Christian, whereby the individuals and the events can be seen in a dynamic set of tensions outside the ideological needs of Synagogia and Ecclesia. Such a move will incorporate and extend the recent tendency to revisualize the converso phenomena in the context of Protestant, Illuminationist and secularizing movements outside of Spain and Portugal during the Early Modern Period. Chapter Five will then will break up even further other normative assumptions that are made concerning the development of what José Faur calls converso culture. What is usually taken for granted is that Jewish civilization in Iberia prior to the Expulsion in 1492 — or some say, the riots and massacres of 1391, or the foundation of the Inquisition in 1482, or the Forced Baptism in Portugal of 1497 — is a normative, coherent and traditional belief system, body of knowledge and ecclesiastical structure. A steady glance at the history of the Sephardim from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, however, reveals a much more complex situation. This complexity arises not least because of the chasm between the followers of the formative character of Gaonic and Maimonidean Judaism which may be typified by the name of Maimonides (abbreviated as Rambam) and the followers of the radically new Judaism of kabbalah, charismatic authority, and pilpul which may be typified by the name of Nachmanides (abbreviated as Ramban). In addition, of course, the specific history of the different kingdoms and citystates of what would eventually become Spain and the smaller kingdom of Portugal cannot be lumped together into one undifferentiated mass: the spiritual map of pre-Expulsion Sepharad would see the followers of Ramban clustered mostly in Catalonia in the south and on the Mediterranean islands, while those of Rambam are to be found further north in Castile. But there is no sharp and clear demarcation. And as we will show, as the persecutions by Christians intensified, the defections to mysticism and messianic fervour spread throughout the Peninsula, with dire consequences for the structures and institutions of traditional Judaism. From this point, in Chapter Six, where we start to see the real complexities of the background out of which the persons we are concerned with in this book — those individuals and families with a Sephardic background who were converted forcibly or willingly to Christianity and then despite the persecution and intimidation of the Holy Office and the limitation of career and social choices of the regulations concerning purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) chose to live in lands ruled by the Spanish Crown and where the Iberian Church dominated with a heavy hand. These people, who constitute the source of the small contingent of individuals and families who find their 11

INTRODUCTION

way into the northernmost territories of New Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — at least in a significant number of instances — did more than choose to remain within the so-called Lands of Idolatry, that is, to live immersed in Spanish culture; they also returned from kingdoms and cities with much greater degrees of tolerance in France, Italy and the Netherlands, as well as from places under Muslim domination in North Africa, the Levant, and south-eastern Europe. It will also be clear that many of these people, rather than being ignorant and uneducated peasants, were university trained professionals, well-read intellectuals, aware of the changes occurring in Protestant nations in science, philosophy, theology, international commerce, and the arts. Therefore their decision to go into voluntary exile in the northern parts of old Mexico, as it then was, had other motivations than merely cynical, practical or romantic; there was no simple passive response that led them into these seemingly God-forsaken territories with no future for their children and grandchildren. Something else was clearly at work, or rather something else was secretly at work, whether completely unconscious or only partly so. What that something else was cannot be stated here and now before we have set forth our argument, redefined our terms, and worked our way through a new set of theoretical models. To make any broad statements at this point will sound precipitous, ridiculous or worse. Nevertheless, in our conclusion — tentative as it may be — in Chapter Seven, it will be possible to draw together the various speculations, discoveries and re-interpretations made in this book. Though there is no attempt to claim that the Penitentes brotherhoods were ever exclusively founded by Jewish refugees from the Inquisition or that the movement was anything but Roman Catholic in intention, practice and significance to the communities it served, it may be said that the original participants and the subsequent generations until very near the present were to some degree different from most other Mexican and Latin settlers in the New World. The conditions in which these early settlers, Jewish and Christian, found themselves and which they partly shaped to their own needs were such as to foster peculiarities in their religious beliefs and practices that cannot be easily explained away as trivial or superficial. It is hoped that at this point in the book we have showed that these peculiarities were amenable to the desires of Crypto-Jews and Marranos, who could be accepted into the Hispanic communities so long as the outsiders made no big show of their differentness nor caused outside interference more than already active because of the unusual features of the brothers’ disciplinary rites and anti-clericalism. We need to keep in mind that in northern Europe itself, because of the profound changes in sensibility and mentality brought about by the Renaissance and Reformation, the most deeply moving and central expressions of faith in church liturgy and art, in processional theatre and spectacle, and in private 12

INTRODUCTION

meditations on the instruments of the crucifixion, very quickly seemed alien, disgusting, and incomprehensible. The sufferings of Christ, the bloodied body hanging on the Cross, and the imitation of these scenes in the eyes, mind, and soul of the faithful almost disappeared into a new kind of internalized religion, silent, rational and orderly, at least in its idealized form.13 No wonder, then, that the Penitentes were regarded as primitive, savage and ignorant by the new social, cultural and spiritual forces that overtook them both in Mexico and the United States. But how can we understand how anyone with a Jewish background — affective and cognitive features of their personality and their group identity — could take part in this brotherhood for so long? That these hidden Sephardim sought membership in the Hermandad because it assured acceptance in the region where they chose to live, work and bring up their children does not mean that they were the creators of the peculiar traits of the brotherhood nor that they were solely responsible for the situation in which the hermanos were often and for long periods of time forced to avoid public notice and to take special efforts to protect their rituals from ridicule and interference. It is probably true, however, that these New Christians reshaped the beliefs and practices for themselves in ways that met their own private, personal and psychological needs, but this reshaping may not have been noticed by the other brothers nor considered contrary to communal needs and memories of what traditional behaviour required. Lastly, I will consider as delicately as possible the question of whether, when the CryptoJews and Marranos made their strategic choice to live in the isolated regions of northern Mexico and to throw in their lot with the Christian communities they found themselves in, they had any inkling that over the course of just a few generations of alienation from all institutions. Could they have guessed that normative practices and memories of Judaism would be lost in just a short time and that their children and their children’s children would all but forget totally that they had once been Jews? To the first generation or two of New Christians, it should certainly have been evident from their own experience in Mexico, Spain and other lands of the Sephardic Diaspora, that maintaining a viable Judaism of any sort was a futile effort without a return to rabbinical culture. Did they consider the choice worth this risk — and that perhaps in some way as yet unfathomable to them it was better to have their children and grandchildren simply survive? Or did they manufacture for themselves and their children, in a subtle manner, a notion that disguise, secrecy and forgetting were acts of penitence, and strange and literal sufferings that hid inside themselves the faith and loyalty to their people, their history and their God that could in no other way be expressed? Or not even “simply survive” but continue to exist in a place 13

Clifford Davidson, Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain (Aldershot, Hamps. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007) pp. 184–185.

13

INTRODUCTION

and among a group of people who would, mysteriously guided by God, would ensure that at the end of time, when the Messiah finally did arrive, there would be understanding and appreciation of this choice?

MORE THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS AB: Was there any suspicion that your family might have Jewish roots before that? MH: No. Except that my maternal grandmother’s family were Penitentes . . . I always thought it was odd that my grandmother’s family practiced Catholicism in such an extreme manner. Their observances were not what I had been taught about Catholicism which had always been a mystery to me anyway . . . I’ve done some research on the Penitentes and believe that its origin may be found in Judaism, especially Jewish mysticism . . . and with the victims of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, I have found many parallels. To my knowledge, no one has ever been able to explain where the Penitentes came from, much less explain the exact relationship with Catholicism.14

Before we can plunge into the questions which this book is really all about, we have to look at some of the theoretical and historical problems which are associated with study of the Penitentes in general and the Crypto-Jews and Marranos who were involved in its foundations, developments, and articulations. THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM For the members, the confraternities not only provided a focus for their devotion — and in some cases the means to living a more meaningful spiritual life — but they also provided an organization for mutual benefit and protection. The confraternity was a bulwark against the vicissitudes of the world, a bulwark which became more and more important as the Hispanic world began to destabilize in the late 1700s and early 1800s. William Wroth15

For half a millennium many Jews who converted to Catholicism in the Iberian Peninsula tried to hide their Jewish ancestry, some attempting to live a double14

15

Mona Hernandez, “Long-time Member [of the Society for Crypto-Jewish Studies], Conference Presenter, Tells Her Story of Discovery and Identity”, Interview by Arthur Benveniste, Halapid 13:1 (Winter 2006) 14. (Format slightly modified.) William Wroth, Images of Penance, Images of Mercy: Southwestern Santos in the Late Nineteenth Century (Norman and London: Taylor Museum for Southwestern Studies, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center by University of Oklahoma Press, 1991) p. 27.

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INTRODUCTION

life, on the outside Christian while on the inside true to the Law of Moses. Some were confused16 and bitter about the continuing persecutions.17 It is understandable that Sephardim would depart the Lands of Idolatry to live in more tolerant places, whether in other Catholic kingdoms of Europe, the new Protestant nations, or the Islamic states under Ottoman control. It is less easy for us to understand, however, why some of these persecuted Jews chose to remain in Spain and Portugal, realms where they were constantly under suspicion by the Inquisition as New Christians. When they could, some of these secret Sephardim escaped to the New Worlds of the Spanish Empire, hoping against hope that they could better hide this shame, this stain of their tainted Jewish blood.18 Whether these people claiming to be, not just Crypto-Jews but descendants of anousim,19 did or even could have passed on any more than a sense of 16

17

18

19

I want to emphasize that “confusion” is a technical term and not merely an emotional state of mixed feelings and inchoate attitudes. To be confused, in this sense, means to be intellectually alert to the logical and political difficulties that obtain in this situation of inherited indeterminacy in a harsh, hostile and persecuting society. The term is analogous to the mental uncertainties Maimonides addressed in his Guide to the Perplexed, where students of rabbinical texts could not reconcile their Jewish ideas with the scientific and philosophical treatises of the ancients and their medieval commentators. The tradition of Secret Judaism inside Iberian lands may go back much further to the time of the Visigoths. See Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York, NY: Random House, 1995) p. 43. The phenomenon itself, of course, can be found in ancient times, as recorded in such books of the Bible as Genesis where Abraham and his wife pretend to be brother and sister when visiting Egypt or the Book of Esther when Mordechai cautions his cousin Hadassah to conceal her Jewish identity at court, even though she has been chosen the new queen. An insider’s account, rather than a scholarly analysis, can be found in L’Inquisition de Goa: La relation de Charles Dellon (1687), eds. Charles Amiel and Anne Lima (Paris: Editions Chandeigne, 1997). A Frenchman in Portuguese India, Dellon reports on the processes and conditions of the Holy Office in Goa where he was incarcerated for five years, including his remarks on judaizers and other New Christians he met in prison. Though a French Roman Catholic himself, he found the methods of the inquisitors not only bizarre and arbitrary, but stupid (p. 190), and consequently the treatment of men and women accused of being secret Jews particularly offensive to his sense of justice and tolerance (p. 164). In the head note to his massive, nearly fourteen-hundred page study of fifteenthcentury Spain and its Inquisition, Netanyahu asserts, “Unless otherwise indicated, the terms Conversos, Marranos and New Christians are used in this work synonymously. Each of them has long served to designate the same group in Jewish, Spanish and European scholarship” (The Origins of the Inquisition, p. vii). As we shall argue — and have done already in previous books and articles — these are not synonymous terms, although — and perhaps precisely because — the same group of people is referred to from different perspectives, at different periods in their private and public lives, and with different ideological constructs at play. Here specifically we will be calling attention to the fact that in origin not all conversos were forced, just as subsequently not all New Christians were Crypto-Jews, that is, individuals and families seeking to live as best they could with incomplete knowledge as Jews, for many were either (as Netanyahu claims for

15

INTRODUCTION

historical desperation and anxiety to their children is part of the problem we are concerned with today because over the past thirty years a lot of voices have suddenly emerged in South and North America to claim this suppressed Jewish identity, at least to the point of honoring the memory of those ancestors who suffered under the harsh rules of the state and the church. A very few also claim to be anousim: not just the great-great grandchildren of people forced to the baptism font, but inheritors of a valid continuing version of Judaism, a Judaism which, if not strictly kosher according to the rulings of rabbis today, nevertheless represents a true faith, one honed on nearly five hundred years of martyrdom and Jewish pride. There is now a Crypto-Jewish Association Conference held annually in the United States and its newsletter Halapid is on the way to becoming a respectable scholarly journal, and more and more books come out of academic presses on the subject of anousim, baalim teshouvim and Marranos, as well as CryptoJews.20 Nevertheless there are still many academic historians who, like the rabbis who refuse to recognize the valid claims of the men and women calling themselves anousim, dig their heels in to deny, on the one hand, that after the first generation or two any of the forced converts to Catholicism in Iberia could have sustained their beliefs and practices as Jews in any meaningful way, that the Inquisition itself invented charges against Judaizers more to confiscate wealth than to purge the state of any real backsliding New Christians, and that modern claims by Hispanics to a secret Jewish heritage is balderdash, a political ploy to gain attention, a racist trick to avoid being classed among a marginalized people, and a self-delusion based on Orientalist prejudice.21 On the one hand, many members of the brotherhood today seek to put to the side, if not deny altogether, the shocking images of Hispanic men (“peons”) beating themselves into a bloody ecstasy in imitation of Christ, and to emphasize instead the good works and community support of the Penitentes as a pious Catholic movement.22

20

21

22

the vast majority) believing and practicing Catholics falsely accused of Judaizing by the Inquisition or Marranos, that is, people confused, indecisive or cynical about their beliefs and thus anxious to be neither Christian or Jewish except insofar as required for personal security or commercial success. Stanley M. Hordes, To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005). Michael P. Carroll, The Penitente Brotherhood: Patriarchy and Hispano-Catholicism in New Mexico (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) and “The Debate over a Crypto-Jewish Presence in New Mexico: The Role of Ethnographic Allegory and Orientalism” Sociology of Religion. Spring 2002. Online at http://findarticles. com/p/articles/mi_m0SOR/is_1_63/ai_84396056 (Read: 09 Jan. 2008. On the problem of Edward Said’s extremely influential and pervasive book Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), see Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007). See, for example, the beautifully produced En Divina Luz: The Penitente Moradas of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1994) with photographs

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INTRODUCTION

On the other hand, similarly stigmatizing through ad hominum attacks on particular historians and anthropologists, whether professional or amateur, these establishment figures deny credibility to the increasing waves of essays and books that seek to study the phenomenon of Crypto-Judaism in the territories of the old Spanish Empire in the Americas. The question, however, is wrongly put, even by the most sympathetic of scholars. For instance Schulamith C. Halevy asks, . . . Whether a secret subculture of Jewish origin existed in the Southwest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More precisely, we want to know if some families of Jewish extraction maintained a separate identity, which they attempted to preserve, or, alternatively, whether some families, knowingly or unknowingly, transmitted a cluster of specifically Jewish practices.23

The expression “Jewish extraction” though off-putting to begin with does seem to target the problematic of whether or not there was a disproportionate number of New Christians from Spain who established the earliest European settlements in northern Mexico at the end of the sixteenth century, but it leaves open — or rather it overlooks — the kind of Jewishness that might have been involved. Why the search should be focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rather than earlier, is disturbing insofar as it presumes that the phenomena associated with secret Jews of all sorts can only be tracked in the most confusing time of

23

by Craig Varjabedian, Essay by Michael Wallis, Foreword by Hermano Felipe Ortega, and Afterword by Hermano Charles M. Carrillo. There are also such other laudatory descriptions of the movement as Alice Corbin Henderson, Brothers of Light: The Penitentes of the Southwest, with illustrations by William Penhallow Henderson, first published in 1937 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, reprinted with an Introduction by Father Thomas J. Steele (Las Cruces, NM: Yucca Tree Press, 1998) and Alberto López Pulido, The Sacred World of the Penitentes (Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000). Of special value are three books by Ruben E. Archuleta in which he combines personal and family reminiscences, reproduction of primary documents, and photographs and artistic reproductions of the santos (sacred objects) relevant to the brotherhood: I Came from El Valle: From the Fields to the Chief ’s Office, ed. Terry Freeman (Pueblo, CO: Schuster’s Printing Inc., 1999), Land of the Penitentes, Land of Tradition, ed. Joe T. Ulibarri (Pueblo West, CO: El Jefe, 2003) and Penitente Renaissance: Manifesting Hope, intro and ed. By Marianne L. Stoller, Forward by Juan Espinosa and Afterword by Marta Weigle (Pueblo West, CO: El Jefe, 2007). Also see several autobiographical narratives first printed as a series of newspaper stories by Abe M. Peña, Memories of Cíbola: Stories from New Mexico Villages, Forward by Marc Simons (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). Somewhat less reliable is Ray Michael Baca, Brotherhood of the Light: A Novel about the Penitentes and the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico, ed. by Andrea Alessandro Cabello (Mountainview, CA: Floriocante Press, 2005). Indications of editors and writers of forewords and afterwords are important in regard to these books produced by non-professional historians; they mark the support and aid of academic scholars and the permission and recognition by the brothers in the Hermandad. Schulamith C. Halevy, “Manifestations of Crypto-Judaism in the American Southwest” Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 18:1–2 (1996) 68–76.

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INTRODUCTION

all — after the independence of Mexico from Spain and after the integration of the territories into the United States. The statement also already makes a sweeping conclusion as to the kind of proof that will be looked for: in “a secret subculture”, with the implications of intentionality, coherence, and historical continuity. In Halevy’s follow-on statement, she offers two possible scenarios for the preservation or transmission of Jewish practices: in one, there is an effort made by the extracted Jews to create or maintain a separate community of practice and identity, and in the other, knowingly or unknowingly, a cluster of practices is preserved, and this batch of behaviors somehow constitutes the prima facie case for Crypto-Jews in the area. What is fudged here are the following points: to maintain these practices over many generations and against great odds, the family would have to have some intention, that is, an awareness of who and what they are, and this has to be proved before the clues can be recognized as anything other than random and meaningless acts and objects. Categorization of the cluster as Jewish, then, has to pass through a filter of historical developments based on a dynamic view of where the extraction of these Sephardim occurred and how it was processed through geographical and chronological distances. To a certain degree, though our focus in this book is on anthropological and historical origins and primary social foundations, some of our argument does indeed rest on the evidence of contemporary Hispanic men and women who have stepped forward to claim their Jewish heritage and often their desire to be accepted as anousim, that is, not so much in the root sense of forced converts themselves, as may or may not have happened to their ancestors four or five hundred years ago, but as descendants of people who in each subsequent generation to the original baptizing were still stigmatized as cristianos nuevos, in other words, always considered new and lesser members of the body of Christ (i.e., the Church), always suspected of insincerity and subversion because of their tainted Jewish blood, and constantly under surveillance by formal or informal agents of the Inquisition. In fact, it is the repeated memory of men and women who declare themselves of New Christian background, many who also claim to be from families who practiced a form of Crypto-Judaism,24 that keeps intersecting with memories of parents and grandparents’ membership in the Brotherhood of the Penitentes that seems most outrageous and challenging to the standard historical and anthropological view of the region. For this hermanidad (brotherhood) seems the most quintessential of traditional Hispanic Catholicism and thus the furthest away from the supposedly mythical heritage of a marginal Sephardic presence.25 So disturbing is the very idea of Jews of any sort being involved in 24

25

Gloria Golden, Remnants of Crypto-Jews among Hispanic Americans, eds. By Andrea Alessandra Cabello and Sohaib Raihan (Mountainview, CA: Floricanto Press, 2005). Marta Weigle, Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood: The Penitentes of the Southwest (Santa Fe, NM: Ancient City Press, 1976).

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INTRODUCTION

the formation of the community and the sustaining of its functions from the time of first settlement by Spaniards into northern New Spain that scholars go out of their way to argue that the Penitentes have no continuity with earlier Franciscan flagellant groups and only took shape in the late eighteenth century, with another set of major reformulations after 1821 when Mexico became independent of Spain and again when the northern region was integrated into the United States a generation later. The Crypto-Jewish claims therefore function as a double transgression: first as an Orientalist agency of colonialist mentality and second as a Jewish plot based on racial exclusivism. One writer, in an online lecture on American Fundamentalism in the American Dream, links the Penitentes to Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) and John Calvin (1509–1564) as paradigmatic of the retrenchment of a group organized against modernism, since they are a self-styled [community of] “true believers” [who] attempt to arrest the erosion of their Spanish religious identity, fortify the borders of the religious community and . . . do so with guns and dogs, and they create viable alternatives to secular institutions and behaviors. And they take the biblical texts and put them without change into their own contexts.26

The commentator then adds, bringing the analogies closer into the present: They fit the criterion of fundamentalism in that they take on the sufferings of Christ exactly. They walk his walk, literally. Mel Gibson’s Passion is the same sort of idea. Apparently he has made the sufferings of Christ so vivid and real that people feel that they are there. The film was a hit! Penitentes take it one step further and actually play the part even leading in rare cases to crucifixions.

While this series of lectures is seeking to understand the presidency of George W. Bush and hence does not dwell on the niceties of historical accuracy, it nevertheless articulates a point of view that needs attention, in that the author’s use of the Penitentes as a fundamentalist Christian group typical of American civilization highlights a key reason why the brotherhood, its historical development and its bizarre behavior raises so many hackles when associated with the Crypto-Jewish phenomenon we are examining. The real problem, it seems to me — putting aside for the moment the question of personal and ideological agendas on the part of the opponents to this return to Judaism and its researchers — is the inaccuracy of concepts used and the consequent failure to generate subtle enough contexts in which to 26

David Dromke, “Lecture II: European Influences — Columbus, Penitentes, Calvin” (14 April 2005) online at http://www/pserie.psu.edu/academic/hss/amdream/oxford/ Lecture2. (Read 20 December 2007). The author’s name is my guess here since it is hard to track down a clear attribution.

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INTRODUCTION

evaluate these concepts. In brief, terms like anous, Crypto-Jew, Marrano and even judaizante cannot be taken as mere synonyms of one another, and the more basic categories of Jewish versus Christian and of tradition, practice and belief as matters of continuity and change over many generations need greater scrutiny and refinement. We will try to show that because all Jewish converts to Catholicism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were not forced to the baptismal font under threat of death or of expulsion and property loss, the general term anousim is inaccurate.27 Similarly, whatever explanation or excuse may be given for one generation’s choices — to escape the Lands of Idolatry or to remain behind nominally as a Christian and hope eventually for a return to Judaism — subsequent generations were each faced with their own problematic and dangerous decisions. The term nuevos cristianos, New Christians, was carried forward for centuries, stigmatized all members of a family, and forced each individual to confront the choices between running away, attempting to live as a pious Catholic, or devising mechanisms for subversion and disguise. While Crypto-Jew may therefore be an apt designation for those who attempted to live as Christian in public but as Jewish in private, not all New Christians made that choice — or could not make any choice throughout their lives. Those who shifted their grounds or remained in constant doubt are better classified as Marranos, thus distinguishing them from either the people who lived the awkward double life or did all they could to live properly within their new faith. Yet again, while judaizante is the term used by the Inquisition to stigmatize former Jews who were perceived as heretically and traitorously hiding their Jewish practices and beliefs, even without awareness, since the very notion of Jewish blood tainted with demonstrable impurities impugns 27

Interesting studies of four men who died “in the Law of Moses” by Miriam Bodian makes the categorical and lexical difficulties evident, not just among scholars today but also in the contemporary records of the Inquisition; for when she subtitles her book and chooses her examples, Bodian undercuts the essential premise of her investigation: Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007). Not only were few of the examples, major and minor, she examines clearly Crypto-Jewish — they were more often judaizantes who only learned they were Jewish and created a form of pseudo-Judaism while under the harsh tutelage of the Holy Office. Her case is also built on the premise that much of what constituted such Crypto-Judaism was actually an incidental side-current to luteranismo, that is, Protestantism in general, as well as variations of Erasmian skepticism, alumbradismo (mystical rationalism), Sebastianism (Portuguese national mysticisim), etc. In so doing, Bodian makes her own essentialist error in taking the Judaism from which such a seventeenth-century Judaism constructed in the confined, distorting and traumatic processes of the Inquisition as a normative or even normal form of rabbinical talmudism. Such a belief-systems crystallized only later, after the Shabbatean crisis. Bodian thus also overlooks the radical shifts and divisions occasioned in Sephardic tradition by the Maimonidean controversies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

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INTRODUCTION

each individual and family with the likelihood of guilt — la mancha evidenced in the Jewish stench, the devilishly long nose and large ears, male menstruation and uncontrollable sexual urges. In addition, it is distortive to operate in scholarship with terms so broad and static as to be almost meaningless. Not only do we have to distinguish between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, as we naturally do between Catholic and Protestant Christians; but we also have to be alert to the dynamic transformations that occurred in the Jewish communities of Iberia — not only Spain and Portugal, which hardly existed as clear-cut national entities in the periods we are most concerned with — as we do in recalling how various Catholic traditions, customs, and regulations could be different before and after the Council of Trent. Above all, perhaps the most significant issue to be considered must be the Maimonidean Controversies, thinking of the way in which traditional Sephardic scholarship and institutional life was changed by the dominance of Nachmanides (1194–1270) over Maimonides (1135–1204), the rise of a new Kabbalah, and the breakdown of the Gaonic principles of rabbinic Judaism. One way to see the suddenness and the extensiveness of the conversions that swept through the Sephardic kehillot in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has been to put it down to a loss of faith in the ability of community organizations and established beliefs to sustain people in a period of crisis: too many intellectual leaders, it has been said, were infected by the Averroism that taught a secular and atheistic hedonism;28 and too many ordinary Jews, assimilated in ways impossible either in the other Christian nations of Europe or in the Islamic East, were swayed by the seeming power and splendor of Catholic Spain in its glorious triumph over the last Muslim kingdoms. Another way to see these mass defections, however, is to find them the result of the divisive quarrels between the followers of Ramban (i.e., Nachmanides) and Rambam (i.e., Maimonides), and to suggest that, when the new ignorance and superstition began to become dominant, many — though hardly a majority of those who switched their religion — assumed they would be safer and less bothered under the guise of nominal Catholicism. Hindsight alone lets us see with tragic clarity that this assumption was false because it was based on the mistaken notion that the Spanish ecclesiastical structures and the intelligent princes would be tolerant. What was not visible — unless one focused closely on the horizon — was that the Counter-Reformation would reinvigorate the Church with a powerful motive of intolerance and that the Catholic Monarchs, flushed with victory over Granada and the accomplishment of the centuries-old struggle for Reconquista, would seek 28

Alain de Libera, “Averroès, le trouble-fête” Science Tribune Alliage 24–25 (1996) online at http://www/tribunes.com/tribune/alliage/24-25/deli.

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INTRODUCTION

to rid itself of the two most alien elements in its midst — Muslims and Jews. It was further impossible to calculate in advance how the huge number of converts from Judaism would change the whole climate of Iberian tolerance. In what follows I try to outline a very complicated argument, one that requires great subtlety of analysis based on an extensive body of documentation. Please forgive me for simply giving this outline and a crude version of the conclusions that seem, at this stage in my investigation, to be the result of my studies over the past fifteen years.

THE CURRENT STATUS OF THE ARGUMENT There is evidence of mental collapse following participation in Penitente rites. A doctor has told us of treating Penitentes who came to the hospital in a highly disturbed state following Holy Week. — George Mills and Richard Grove29

As in the general picture of positioning the Hispanics who claim to be children of the Crypto-Jewish heritage in the American Southwest, we have to consider, after the larger set of distinctions made above, the more particular categories in Colorado and New Mexico. For instance, N. Valdes, in an online lecture on “Religious Changes in New Mexico”, points out that ecclesiastical history in this region is diverse and dynamic, if not quite as full and deep as that in New Spain and other parts of the Empire.30 In fact, the evidence increasingly shows that there are two key factors normally neglected — part of what we shall discuss as Incidentalism — in the argument over the validity and meaning of the claims to Crypto-Judaism: first, the region was first settled by a population distinctive in its high proportion of New Christians, and hence internally different from other parts of Spanish America; and second, this northernmost part of the Mexican realm was open to international influences, focused on a few individuals and families, to be sure, but significant because of the small population, its isolation, and its relative neglect by both civil and ecclesiastical authorities to the south.31 There is a split, as it were, between those who, following Judith Neulander, take their skepticism to the extreme in denying the phenomenon altogether, and those like Stanley Hordes and the Society for Crypto-Jewish Studies who operate 29

30

31

George Mills and Richard Grove, Lucifer and the Crucifer: The Enigma of the Penitentes, 2nd printing (Colorado Springs, CO: Reprinted from the 1955 Brand Book of the Denver Westerners for the Taylor Museum of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1966), p. 17. N. Valdes, “Religious Changes in New Mexico” online at http://www.edu/~nvaldes/326/ religiouschanges. (Read 8 January 2008). Eva Alexandra Uchmany, La vida entre el judaísmo y el cristianismo en la Nueva España, 1580–1606 (México: Archivo General de la Nación/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992).

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INTRODUCTION

on several planes at once to give credence to the anousim, and to substantiate their personal testimony through genealogical and genetic research. I respond to both kinds of approach throughout the book by a variety of means, ranging from a historical survey of the evidence regarding the nature and history of the Jewishness supposedly at issue to a more theoretical approach in which I question the validity of the questions set up and the academic models of what constitutes facts and concepts in this instance. I also find that I have to speak against objections made from rabbinical orthodoxy. The reluctance by such authorities to recognize the truth-claim of the anousim on halachic grounds is shocking. It is an insult to these survivors of centuries of persecution. How so? by questioning the ethical sincerity of the claimants, their long-term genealogical connections to Judaism, and their threat to the authority of the concept of the Law, the regulations concerning conversion, and the validity of any subsequent marriages between such returning Crypto-Jews or Marranos and future Jewish partners from within the existing Orthodox community. Though I have no authority to argue in a rabbinical court, as it were, my case has to be external to these Orthodox circles, and will rest only on an appeal to those talmudic principles which call for respect to men and women who were led astray, who were born into questionable and threatened circumstances, and whose sufferings and humiliations over many generations have been enough to establish their bona fides. There is a pressing quality to the concept of Incidentalism that lies behind this book and urges it forward, so that the arguments presented in regard to the historical problem of Marranos and Penitentes resonate in our own times and with wider significance. Let us take the case of Rina Castelnuovo, a photographic journalist who regularly publishes in The New York Times, New York and America’s newspaper of record, as the term goes. According to Phyllis Chesler, who monitors such things — and with the long-term scrutiny of Charlie Bernhaut, who recently passed away, but was the founder of “Americans for a Safe Israel”, Ms Castelnuovo has a tendency to create images and narratives that downplay Israeli and Jewish suffering at the expense of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim rights and claims this kind of “satanic midrashing” of history, as I have called it, manipulates evidence, sometimes to the point of generating totally false images, narratives and interpretations otherwise dubious and ambiguous “facts.” In Chesler’s words, among several instances cited to commemorate Bernhaut’s frustrating and frustrated attempts to influence the editors of The New York Times and the general public: One September 11, (!)32 1998, Castelnuovo provided a photo of the grieving family of a Palestinian women shot “by accident.” It [The New York Times] did not balance 32

Chesler’s insertion of an exclamation mark here indicates the irony of the date, three years prior to the world-shifting terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and a plane flying over the fields of western Pennsylvania.

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INTRODUCTION

this photo with that of a grieving Israeli family whose civilian member was shot “on purpose.” As Bernhaut phrased it in his letter to Arthur Ochs Sulzburger, Jr. in April, 2000: “Of course, Jewish suffering is nonexistent (irrelevant).”33

In other words, Jewish suffering is “incidental” to the false narrative of Middle Eastern and world history as expounded, created, fabricated by almost all modern media — newspapers, television, internet services and personal blogs. To a great extent, this book is an exposure of the historical conspiracy which ignores or trivializes the suffering of Marranos and Penitentes, mocks their attempts to gain respectability and dignity, and demeans the scholarship which seeks to provide a fair and decent account of where and how they were founded, developed, and achieved their current position. ORIENTALISM AND DISORIENTATION Characteristically, Orientalism is essentialist, racialist, patronizing and ideologically motivated.34

What is striking about the argument concerning the validity of claims by hundreds — or thousands — of Hispanics in the southwestern states of America that they are of Crypto-Jewish background is that opposition comes more from two key sources, the Ashkenazic rabbinical authorities who behave as though ignorant of Sephardic history and so disrespectful of these men and women who wish to be recognized as part of the Jewish world and to learn the principles of belief and practice their ancestors were deprived of for four or five hundred years while still determinedly resisting complete assimilation into the Catholic Church, and from anthropologists and local historians, many of them assimilated secular Jews, who turn the theses of “Orientalism” — that is, the extrapolated slur from Edward Said’s highly contentious book of the same name against anyone who dares criticize Third World peoples, postColonial hatred of the West, and the Palestinization of history — against the persons and circumstances of these self-professed anousim, as though the desire to be given full status as Jews or at least to have their family histories accorded validity as records of courageous and sincere loyalty to the ancestors who suffered half a millennium. The argument from halachic sources, based on a questionable ultra-Orthodox pilpulism, is very insulting, but no more so than the increasing hostility by such groups in Israel to West European and 33

34

Phyllis Chesler, “Photos that Lie: Building the Case Against Israel, Article by Article, Day after Day” Chesler Chronicles (12 May 2008) online at http://pajamamedia.com/ phyllischesler. Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents (Woodstock and New York, NY: The Overlook Press, 2006) p. 3.

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INTRODUCTION

North American Reform, Conservative and, almost unbelievably, Modern Orthodox rabbis.35 However, the most serious and demeaning of the reasons adduced to disbelieve the Mexicans in the United States who beg to be recognized and respected as Jews is that of Orientalism. Ever since it first appeared in 1978, Edward Said’s Orientalism has become an almost unquestioned explanation for Western attitudes towards the Muslim East and a guide to the study of what is called Post-Colonialism.36 What it outlines about the racist and colonialist attitudes of the great European scholars who created “Orientalism” in the sense of a disciplined approach to the study — and profound appreciation — of Eastern cultures, languages and people has become now the essence of political correctness. Its title is repeated like a mantra whenever topics such as Israel and the Palestinians come up, or American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. On the other hand, a scholar such as Bernard Lewis, with a more scholarly and ambiguous approach to the history of Islam and its impact on world history, is either ignored completely or subject to ritual abuse.37 Said’s political agenda as an anti-Zionist activist has long been known and the speciousness in the 35

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37

As part of a series of voices debating the issue, often with toxic intensity, the most substantial and extensive is by Gershom Gorenberg, “How Do You Prove You’re A Jew” Magazine Section, New York Times (2 March 2008) and now available online at East European Jewish History at [email protected]. According to Gorenberg, “In the early years of the State [of Israel], those serving in the rabbinate generally identified with the project of building a Jewish state and felt a connection with secular Jews. Politics changed that. Thirty years ago, ultra-Orthodox parties held 5 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. Today, they hold 18. Secular politicians need their support to build a stable coalition government. One way to gain it is to back ultra-Orthodox candidates for rabbinic posts. It one of the strangest alliances that politics can create: the secular politicians regard ‘Jewish’ mainly as a nationality, an ethnic identity that includes both believers and nonbelievers. For the rabbis they have empowered, ‘Jewish’ is exclusively a religious category, and secular Jews are at best estranged cousins.” Moreover, Gorenberg writes, “the reign of doubts extend even to Orthodox rabbis in America. ‘They’re not familiar with them,’ Friedman told me. ‘They say: “The rabbis in the United States, in England, aren’t the kind we know. Someone can define himself as an Orthodox rabbi. But really he’s Reform”’. That American rabbis, who otherwise lament the loss of modern assimilated Jews through inter-marriage and indifference, should turn away large groups of Crypto-Jews who beg to be seen as full-fledged Jews and who are willing to learn — but only blanch at being told they need to convert, not merely repent their long separation, as though they were goyim — is astounding. For an excellent assessment of Said’s Orientalism, see Ibn Warraq, Defending the West; and the review of Ibn Warraq’s An Unfettered Mind: “An Unfettered Mind” in The New English Review for December 2007 online at http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage. cfm.frm/13212/seco_id/1212-65KB. (Read 9 December 2008). Also see Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents (Woodstock and New York, NY: The Overlook Press, 2006). Fouad Ajami, “A Sage in Christendom: A Personal Tribute to Bernard Lewis” WJJ.com. Opinion Journal from The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, 1 May 2006 online at http://www.Opinion journalcom/forms.printThis. (Read: 9 January 2008)

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INTRODUCTION

argument and the shoddy scholarship of Orientalism well-rehearsed. Moreover, for all his years of living and studying in the United States, Said shows no understanding of the principles of enlightened scholarship upon which the literature he debunks is based.38 That Orientalism should be cited by those attempting to discredit the study of Crypto-Judaism in the southwestern United States — as well as elsewhere in Latin America and the Hispanic world — should come as no surprise to those of us who wish to investigate sympathetically the multi-generational persistence of Jewish suffering, what Nathan Wachtel calls the faith of memory, the memory of one’s own and one’s ancestors’ sufferings.39 But let us see what the main principles Said sets out are, how are they are applied in the matter of men and women attempting to claim their long-hidden and denied Jewish identities, and what purpose the politically correct scholars have in both denying the anousim their right to call themselves Jews after half a millennium and in pouring scorn on the cultural historians who study these claims and their implications. OCCIDENTALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS Only a people who have transcended mythological thinking can realize their own boundaries.40

Less familiar than the once acceptable term Orientalism, which began in French scholarship to designate writers concerned with investigations into the languages and cultures of the new worlds of the Middle and Far East, 38

39

40

It is because of those who cite Said’s Orientalism in opposition to studies of the Penitentes and the Marranos that my own book has to take on a political edge. But that edge hopefully does not surface in anything more than the impressionistic structures, and especially in the oblique and frequent use of headnotes after each chapter’s title and subtitles. Nathan Wachtel, La foi du souvenir: les labyrinths marranes (Paris, Editions du Seuil [La Librairie du XXIe siècle], 2001). This foi du souvenir should be distinguished from the charge against writers who see modern Judaism as built on a “lachrymose history” that culminates in the Holocaust, which is therefore, if not completely denied, then trivialized to the extent of being a mere excuse for the foundation of the State of Israel and the exploitation of the Palestinian people. On the one hand, while it is crucial to take the enormous reality of the Shoah into account in all that is subsequently studied in the past, since it reveals what is otherwise hidden or shunted to the side as “incidental” to what is “important”,” on the other hand, Wachtel’s argument turns on what men and women actually said about what was meaningful in their lives as persecuted New Christians in Latin America, not what “objective” (Christian or secular) scholars said about them in the past or now. I shall explain that what we are studying here about Marranos and Penitentes makes sense only once we accept that the impossible has already happened and the unbelievable is true. José Faur, Homo Mysticus: A Guide to Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999 [1998]) p. 150.

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INTRODUCTION

Occidentalism has always seemed to have a less than savory tone and seems to be engaged in a political debate. Occidentalism has been used for different purposes, sometimes to describe writers in the Near, Middle or Far East who have spoken disparagingly of Western culture, often as a reaction against colonialist intrusions. It was also used in the last years of the nineteenth century to refer to scholars in Europe and the United States studying the ancient cultures of the American West and in particular the native American languages, and occasionally supposed relics of pre-Columbian explorers from the Mediterranean world.41 More recently, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit42 have taken it as a complete reversal of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Playing with Said’s bizarre and twisted version of history, whereby Westerners become incapable of ever seeing or speaking in a fair, objective and sympathetic manner about the parts of the world their governments — “in their name,” as the contemporary political slogan has it — these two authors hit back with a witty and pungent myth of their own. What I want to do here, however, is to put aside mythmaking of either sort, and look at a different intellectual approach. By Occidentalism I mean something that is not quite the opposite of Orientalism in Edward Said’s sense. There is no equivalent movement to deny integrity to Muslim or Arabic scholarship in the same way as pro-Palestinian academics and some Western intellectuals attack the whole tradition of European studies of the Islamic world and its cultures. There was a brief effort in the last years of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth by Salomon Reinach (1852–1932) to argue that the origins of writing and of other aspects of ancient civilization could be found at least as much, if not much earlier in the heart of Europe. This perspective tried to see another developmental model, not that of Hegel’s dialectical history, with its vision of a constant flow from East to West, wherein the superior Aryan peoples and civilizations always absorbing and renewing in an advanced way the ideas and institutions of the earlier nonEuropean society. Reinach called this Hegelian phenomenon, already a virtual given at the turn of the century, “the mirage of the east.”43 In a sense, the attempts 41

42

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For example, the citation from Robert J. Farquharson, who in 1877 wrote about the hope of finding “one of our learned occidentalists . . . a future Champollion, having the key to unlock this American language”; cited in Richard Flavin, “Fell and Egyptian” online at http://www.flavinscorner.com/com/fe2. (Seen 3/06/2008). That Farquharson uses italics to highlight the word shows he knows it to be a neologism modeled after Orientalism and that this new breed of scholarship will follow in the footsteps of men like Champollion. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004). The first mention of this idea of the “Mirage oriental” seems to be in a review of G. Wilke, Süd-westeuropäische Megalithkultur und ihre Beziehungen zum Orient by Salomon Reinach in the Revue Archéologie I (1914) 142, cited by Reinach in his Éphémérides de Glozel (Paris: Kra, 1929) p. 4, under the heading for 1912 in a survey of precursor remarks pertaining to the Glozel Affair. In a note to this self-citation, Reinach adds, “Cette thèse

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INTRODUCTION

to denigrate the West’s scholarly interest and aesthetic fascination with the Oriental world as purely racist, colonialist and imperialist distort history and do a disservice to scholarship. In a similar way, the extension of the canards contained within the ideology of Said’s Orientalism to anthropologists and historians who concern themselves with evidence of East-West contacts in Europe and the New World seems outrageous. Furthermore, there remains in certain quarters, usually outside of academic circles, an ideological tendency to overlook and devalue the role of Islam in taking up the burden of Greek civilization from the Latin Christian kingdoms of North Africa and the Mediterranean islands in the seventh century, and especially in Iberia, and then sharing it, through translations made by Arab-speaking Jewish scholars, with the West. In this manner, it is argued that European Christian nations were long locked into a Dark Age of ignorance, superstition and intolerance, and they proved to be, in this extension of the myth, far crueler and arrogant towards non-Christians in their midst and dissenters within their own Christian Church than Muslims ever were, even allowing for the processes of Dhimmitude, and continue to be, even today, witness the policies of George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard, crusaders and bigots at heart. Islam, from this biased perspective, by virtue of its credentials as victim culture, is more intrinsically the superior civilization.

INCIDENTALISM It is difficult to understand how the BBC ever saw the incident [in Jerusalem] as anything other than an attack. The bulldozer rammed into a bus, then pushed into it several more times, shattering glass and throwing the passengers into a panic. [The Arab driver] then zigzagged through the road to harm as many motorists as possible before he was stopped.44

Incidentalism is my own coinage to categorize those who see Jews as at best incidental to world history, at worst a bother, a disease, or mythical monsters. Certainly after the founding of Christianity and the dispersion of the Hebrew

44

des origins occidentals et, par suite, non sémitiques, trouva faveur dans le milieu des préhistoriens racists et antisémites qui suivaient les impulsions de Kossina, professeur à Berlin, et de son organe Mannus. Ce serait une histoire amusante à reconter” (p. 9, n. 9). Unfortunately events barely ten years away would make the implications and consequences of such racist prehistory anything but amusing to recount. “Copycat Attack — Copycat Headlines,” HonestReporting (23 July 2008) online at action@ honestreporting.com (Seen 24 July 2008).

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INTRODUCTION

people into marginalized enclaves, they seem to remain outside mainstream politics, culture and spiritual ideas.45 At best, this point of view allows Jews the role of a permanently persecuted people, of most interest only when they are murdered, expelled or ridiculed, but ignored — or as today in Israel — when they are active, defend themselves and claim the status of normality in world affairs. One of the key factors in the rejection of the claims of anousim and of the serious scholarship of historians of Crypto-Judaism is that the place of men and women of Jewish heritage or ancestry in New Mexico and Colorado was and remains incidental to normative circumstances — that is, essentially unimportant and irrelevant. Anyone who claims otherwise is a crank.

A NEW APPROACH I have seen many moradas, some of them large and some small, some handsome and some plain, some wellcared for and some tumble-down, but I have always had a profound sense of respect, awe, of wonder, and even of fear, like Yahweh warning Moses at the burning bush: “The place where you stand is holy ground.”46

The new approach begins with making distinctions where unfortunately much scholarship does not. It then provides a series of new contexts, some of which have been suggested by other scholars in this field, but most of which have not been considered or treated only in a casual and inadequate manner: these new contexts are aesthetic or artistic, rhetorical or dramatic, and psychological or psychohistorical. They supplement and extend the contexts of comparative anthropology, religious history and a range of so-called post-modernistic analyses, such as microhistory, post-colonialism and feminist and gay studies. After this outline and tentative conclusions, I will finish by asking several questions which I do not think it has been possible to ask before — or, if they were asked, their import and resonance were operative in a very different mentality.

45

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A typical example may be Mario Vargas Llosa, “The Paradoxes of Latin America” The American Interest: Policy, Politics, Culture. Digital online at file://Khosa. (Read 3/1/8). Throughout this review outlining the various influences on the shape of a Latin American mentality, Llosa makes no mention at all of Jews, Marranos or New Christians: the Crypto-Jewish presence in the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British colonies is completely airbrushed out of the picture. Ruben E. Archuleta, Penitente Renaissance: Manifesting Hope (Pueblo West, CO: El Jefe, 2007) p. 7.

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INTRODUCTION

NEW DISTINCTIONS: MARRANOS, CRYPTO-JEWS AND PSEUDO-JEWS “Is that why we have to become Catholic?” “No. It’s because Hitler wants to get rid of the Jews. His soldiers just invaded Poland and started a war.” “Why does he want to get rid of the Jews?” “Just because they are Jews.” “Are we Jews?” “Yes. But it is not safe to be a Jew, so we will hide in Spain and tell everyone we are Catholic.”47

As we remarked at the start of this chapter, it is no longer efficient to assimilate the key terms of Marrano, Judaizers, Crypto-Jew, New Christian and Converso as part of one continuous socio-spiritual phenomenon, just as we cannot assume that all such Sephardim who became Christians did so under coercion, that is, were anousim, since many did so out of expediency, cynicism, confusion or careful theological reasoning. For while there could be seen a continuum from all individuals and families converted, forcibly or voluntarily, from Judaism or Islam to Roman Catholicism, it cannot be sustained that all these people — whether in the first generation or over several centuries — remembered their origins, understood the ethical and religious principles of the ancestral belief system, or desired to be identified as Jews or Muslims. Let me now make some more subtle distinctions and also add into the list the term Pseudo-Jews.

NEW CONTEXTS The kingdom of Greece was a terror to the world, but Matthias the priest, “with faith and not with weapons, boldly met the terror and defeated it. Exodus Rabba48

Several new contexts thus open up in which to measure and evaluate the place of various kinds of Jewish members in the Penitentes. Among them are an artistic/ aesthetic view, a rhetorical/dramatic view, and a psychological view. Each of these new contexts allows us to appreciate the ability to endure hundreds of years of 47

48

Trudi Alexy, The Mezuzah in the Madonna’s Foot. Marranos and Other Secret Jews. A Woman Discovers her Spiritual Heritage (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993) p. 38. Khazazrar, The Midrash: Russian Synthesis in Translation, p. 47 online at http://khazarzar. skeptik.net/books/jud/midrashi. (Seen 24/08/2005)

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INTRODUCTION

suffering and the strength of character to remain loyal to an ancestral faith, even when cut off from the books, ideas, and practices that give it rational form. Remember we are not saying that the Penitentes is a secret Jewish organization or that all or most of its members are the heirs to a New Christian heritage. What we are saying is that, when viewed in these new contexts, as well as in the historical matrix already outlined above, we can see that the brotherhood grew up out of very special circumstances, wherein a disproportionate number of Hispanic settlers were former Jews escaping from the Inquisition, and thus it represents a special kind of creative response to these circumstances, certainly within popular Catholic tradition, but both distinct from other parts of the former New World Spanish Empire and continuous in its developments because of the continuing need, even after Mexican independence and American conquest, to remain separate from mainstream culture and political life, to be secret, cautious, and vigilant in the light of official and informal hostility, and to be loyal to one another and the local communities, thus resisting assimilation and rejection of “the old ways.” Each new context provides a way of measuring the inner resources of the Penitentes in their beliefs, practices, and functions. They are ways of seeing the brotherhood drawing on its inherited inner resources, rather than being pushed and shaped into alien forms and attitudes.

THE ARTISTIC/AESTHETIC VIEW My soul wept the morning of September 17, 1992, as I gazed at the burned- out remains of the morada of which I have been a member for the past fifteen Lenten seasons. Our beloved two-hundred-year-old structure was vandalized and burned. The morada’s historic contents, including our beloved santos, centuries-old manuscripts, and other religious paraphernalia, were destroyed or damaged. — Hermano Charles M. Carillo, Hermano de la Morada de Nustra Señora de Dolores del Alto, January 199449

The evidence for the presence of Crypto-Jews, Marranos and similar quasiJudaizantes in the regions of northern New Spain that later became part of the United States cannot be the kind of simplistic and superficial analogies brought 49

En Divina Luz: The Penitente Moradas of New Mexico, Photographs by Craig Varjabedian, Essay by Michael Wallis, Foreward by Hermano Felipe Ortega, Afterword by Hermano Charles M. Carillo (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Pres, 1994) p. 120.

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INTRODUCTION

forward by local historians and folklorists unfamiliar with Judaism as something other than East European shtetle culture in the nineteenth century and ignorant of Iberian intellectual and religious history from the fifteenth century onwards. Merely to point to six-pointed stars engraved on gravestones or children’s spinning toys that look something like dreidles hardly is convincing. Nor do indistinct family romances about secret rooms and habits of washing up on Friday nights. Traditions concerning slaughter of beasts and food preparation do, however, begin to come closer to indicative traits, as do habits of thought that show distrust of clerical rituals, avoidance of particular prayers, and substitution of nearly forgotten liturgical tags and gestures. However, most convincing of all are recollections of habits of thought concerning moral and ethical issues, attitudes towards, women and sexual relations, and feelings of anxiety and fear in regard to discussion of sacramental matters. The artistic and aesthetic view therefore takes us into the realm of intellectual experiences as they are passed on in non-formal terms and as they can be articulated without recourse to Talmudic or other rabbinical discourses. In a sense the ritual behavior of the Penitentes can be understood as acting out of spiritual and mythic phenomena embodied in the santos used in Catholic imagining of the life and body of Christ.50 It is in these performances, seemingly the most non-Jewish of customs and the most Catholic of gestures, that we must confront the possibility of Marrano influence.

THE RHETORICAL/DRAMATIC VIEW The forced institutionalization of penitente traditions by the Roman Catholic hierarchy silenced the range of sacred experiences within the penitente community. Interpretations of the sacred world of the penitentes were narrowly defined and restricted to acts of flagellation. Consequently, what emerged was a “flagellant-bound: historical record.”51

Not only do the defining ritual acts of the penitential brotherhood embody and put into motion the iconography of traditional Spanish Catholic piety as transported and developed in New Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth 50

51

William Wroth, Images of Penance, Images of Mercy: Southwestern Santos in the Late Nineteenth Century, with an Introduction to Part 2 by Marta Weigle (published for Taylor Museum of Southwestern Studies, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center by the University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, OK and London, 1991) Alberto López Pulido, The Sacred World of the Penitentes (Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000) p. 77.

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INTRODUCTION

centuries, but they are rooted in earlier medieval and antique customs and ideas. At the same time, in their expression of profound feelings of guilt and determination to identify with the sufferings of the Corpus Christi, the brothers provide a substance into which highly conflicted and ambiguous emotions can be projected — and hidden from normative cultural recognition in the Hispanic communities where they are performed as fundamental exercises in social bonding and spiritual identity. It is here on the body of the penitents that conversos could express at once their shame and guilt for having within them the tainted blood of their Jewish ancestors and their anxiety and fear of being discovered to be less than sincere, fervent Catholics because of their family traditions of doubt and rejectionism. Even more, the hermanos of New Christian background can articulate a disguised performance of circumcision, just as in Catholic mysteries the blood of the Cross was prefigured in the brit millah or ot ha’ brit of Jesus eight days after his birth in Bethlehem.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW/PSYCHOHISTORY When a discourse becomes diabolical, de Certeau tells us in The Writing of History (1988), “Its language changes status.” Significantly, during the time when El Nuevo Reino was established, the Enlightenment was taking hold over Europe. During this period, the “world” is transformed into space; knowledge is organized around a looking-over. Thus there is a problem of truth when it assumed the form of an unstable place such as El Nuevo Reino. “A truth becomes doubtful.” It is not possible to discern if these signifiers that have transformed themselves from words to spaces are in the category of truth or of falsehood, “if they can be ascribed to reality, or to the imagination.” The discourse regarding the Jews becomes a “language of illusion.”52

As soon as we move away from a strictly documentary version of historiography, wherein every interpretation must be based on the availability of written records — Inquisition archives, private letters and journals, contemporary chronicles and diplomatic reports — we find that what has been said in general about conversos or New Christians is highly speculative (to say the least) and interpreted according to often questionable assumptions and inappropriate 52

Marie Theresa Hernández, Delírío. The Buried History of Nuevo León. The Fantastic, the Demonic, and the Réel (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002 [2000]) p. 171.

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INTRODUCTION

paradigms. Therefore, to provide the new contexts and perspectives suggested here, is not merely to challenge received opinions with even more tenuous explanations, but actually to confront the circumstances of the past with greater sympathy than normally accorded and, at the same time, to come closer to the dynamic properties of the Crypto-Jews and Marranos with concepts they could have understood themselves — had they had the leisure and the sense of security necessary for such an enterprise in introspection. While psychoanalytic insights can provide a starting point for such interpretations by wiping away the detritus of slander and self-delusion that often clings like a toxic crust over the otherwise hidden actuality of inquisitorial records and private letters — cutting to the quick, as it were, of essentially human experiences that we ourselves share with men and women of a mere four or five hundred years ago — there are several attendant problems nevertheless. First, of course, when non-professionals use psychoanalytic terms, they tend to treat them as more rigid and inflexible than they really are, imposing paradigmatic and formulaic patterns of sexual and infantile behavior that were developed in quite different circumstances at the turn of the nineteenth century. Second, even professional psychoanalysts, when they attempt to write as historians, tend to misread documents and their contexts, especially to recognize literary and other cultural commonplaces, and thus to mis-hear registers and tones encoded into the quite complex, multi-layered texts being analyzed, and misperceive baroque distortions of space and time described by victims and inquisitors alike. Third, professional psychoanalysts, guided by current directives emanating from modern secular and pluralistic societies, tend to elevate individuals — egopsychology and relationship theories — over collectivities, both horizontal and multi-generational, and hence miss out altogether or at least distort phenomena that occur in large extended families, over periods of two or three centuries, and located in a diversity of linguistic, cultural and confessional communities sequentially, alternatively or simultaneously. Psychohistory at its best can handle these difficulties because it is based on a concept of self and group that is more dynamic and dialectical than other modes of psychoanalytic inquiry. Beginning with infant-mother gazing as a prerequisite for understanding the neuronal and hormonal development of personality and moving through many stages of child-rearing to emergent adolescence relationships and then adult experiences and trauma, psychohistory deals with group consciousness, collective unconscious, communal trances, and similar behaviors, feelings and cognitive events. Crypto-Judaism and Marranism are not so much private, individual states of being as group phenomena, and are not static moments of crisis or trauma but long-term and changing experiences. Given that what was most suppressed by the forced conversions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Iberia was precisely the male institutions of rabbinic Judaism — synagogues, yeshivot, burial societies and so on — what was left to 34

INTRODUCTION

carry on the culture in its widest sense was domestic Judaism, predominantly the woman’s realm, both in the performance and belief in the laws of cleanliness, food preparation, child-reading, rituals of Sabbath and other home celebrations and memorial occasions, and in the always secretive rites and attitudes towards magical healing, control over the body and its emotions in regard to sexuality and procreation, and spiritual rivalries within the family and among neighbors and business associates. For limited periods of time after the mass conversions in Iberia secret synagogues and schools may have existed, although this vision of Crypto-Judaism seems a rather romanticized and heroic view, professed by scholars such as Cecil Roth prior to the Shoah. More likely and more normatively Marranism prevailed, partly with women as the chief agents of transmission of practical Judaism, and therefore, because not monitored by rabbinical authorizes for halachic accuracy, subject to emotional pressures of anxiety and fear. In Marranism, quasi-Jewish doubts, hesitations and speculative reconstructions prevail, so that beliefs and performances of religious acts seem to be shaped from within Catholic norms and according to popular Iberian custom, asserted as reactive assertions of difference and subversive or cynical parodies of supposedly unquestioned truths. But what psychohistorian are most concerned with is, as Lloyd deMauss says, “the emotional life of nations.” Thus it is by concern for those factors which most impinge on the development of emotional life that we come to grasp the presence of Crypto-Jews and Marranos in the Hispanic communities of the southwestern United States. The factors that do this centre on those fundamental facets of physiological and psychological life that can be seen: (1) in what is and what is not eaten, (2) in how the body is cared for, nurtured, disciplined, experienced and made meaningful, (3) in how children are born into a household, a family and a community, along with how the mother is treated by her husband, by other relatives inside and outside the household, and by neighbors and community officers, lay and ecclesiastical, and (4) in what techniques are used to educate children, evaluate their potential for danger, protect and be protected from their immature emotional and cognitive faculties. At the same time, perhaps more incisively, the presence of New Christians has to be seen and understood within the traditional regimes of hiding, disguise, simulation and dissimulation,53 whether in a formal manner, as in 53

According to Alberto Asor Rosa, La cultura della controreforma (Bari: Laterza, 1989) “dissimulation was of capital importance for European morals in the seventeenth century”; cited by Edmir Missio in “A dissimulação como virtude entre os jesuitas da Contra-Reforma” Memorandum: Memória em psicologia 9 (2005) 121–131 online at http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/~memorandum/109/mission. Further discussions will indicate that there is, first of all, a distinction between simulation and dissimulation, then a distinction between such disguise and masking based on whether the intentions are evil or virtuous, and further distinctions made on circumstances of individual, national

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INTRODUCTION

works of literature, anamorphotic art, or rhetorical equivocation or casual, perhaps even unconscious technologies of social relationships, spiritual rituals, and civic actions.54

POST-POST-MODERNISM: MICROHISTORY Assimilation to a Christian environment affected thought patterns and feelings, and the manner in which Jewish values were processed and validated. Semantic assimilation touched the most basic of Jewish beliefs: monotheism.55

In Post-Modernism, deeply embedded in the whole “project” of devaluing the Enlightenment and collusive in the enterprise of self-mocking the Judeo-Christian roots of Western Civilization, there is a distinct aversion to what is called “the master narrative”, a sense of history as the unrolling of a single line of development, even if it is one which has to jump around from one place to another so as to keep the “story” progressing through the ages. The master narrative is rejected because it is taken to be an aggressive colonialist discourse that gobbles up, digests and evacuates the “real” stories of native, non-European nations or the “colonized folk” inside Europe itself. Since what is left over when this single story is fissured into an insidious series of ideological constructs and the many narratives of the other are liberated is a highly complex mass of contradictory tales of identity, each of which — except those belonging to the previously hegemonic master storytellers — has its own autonomy and integrity; and, since the very idea of a single all-inclusive, defining history that culminates in justification of Eurocentric, imperialist discourse, these tales of otherness cannot ipso facto contradict one another, proceed in a causal sequence towards any recognizable culmination in the present or near future, or, worst of all politically incorrect notions, reveal weakness, regression or willingness to assimilate to another story of identity. Instead, there are only small-scale, local, virtually timeless fables.

54

55

or religious grounds. The key factor we will be developing is that these modes of hiding one’s identity and pretending to be other than what one really is — if it is known to the self, let alone to others — underlies the entire project of the Marranos on the Maradas we are investigating in this book. It is a matter of aesthetic, political, psychological, spiritual and cosmic concern to the people involved in the enterprise. On anamorphosis, see Frederick A. De Armas, Quixotic Frescoes: Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Art (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2006) pp. 133, 161, etc. José Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992) p. 13.

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INTRODUCTION

Manifestly riddled with absurdities, incongruities and inner contradictions, such a politically correct formulation of microhistory can only turn away from national narrations, focus on great men and women, and intellectual progress and rest on emotions and opinions, marginalized and downtrodden folk, and material culture and production. Moreover, since the microhistorian post-modernist cannot discriminate, adjudicate or operate outside of the invisible paradigm of white, bourgeois European peoples bad and colored, proletariat or colonized non-European peoples good, the whole political agenda of the discipline remains silent and invisible, but vulnerable to what therefore must be violently eschewed — reason, objectivity and scientific skepticism; any application of these standards being taken as racist, globalist, and Zionist. Indeed, at the heart of the endeavor is anti-Semitism because Judaism-Zionism (the two categories having now been assimilated to one another by Orientalism) rests on a master narrative (the Bible) of the chosen people (Israel) who cannot belong anywhere or at any time because of their historical belief in and rational obedience to the Law.

POST-COLONIALISM A cette modernité égarée, la sagesse de l’exil et du retour ouvre une voile de salut qui fraie à l’humanité un au-delà de la modernité insoupçonné. La modernité a dénie l’exil, l’idée que l’âme étai en exil dans ce monde qu’elle a voulu totalement habiter en en chassant le plus radicalement possible l’étrangeté, éradiquant ses nids de fixation qu’étaient la tradition et la religion.56

Post-colonialism, along with its cousins anti-imperialism and Orientalism, is premised on a view that is ideologically laden with the polemic of rejection of Euro-centrism, as a fairly mild articulation, and anti-Americanism, antiSemitism, and anti-Zionism in more rabid forms. The notion that colonialism is ipso facto unjust, cruel, and evil, however, is made problematical by the emphasis on European, Christian and then Zionist criminality in regard to slavery, exploitation and expropriation of non-European wealth over the past five hundred years, while the more general consideration of ancient, Arab and Chinese or Japanese colonialisms is put aside as irrelevant or incidental. In this clearing away of history’s long narrative of suffering and exile, the postmodernists have transposed the configuration of Jewish Galut into a monstrous paradigm where Jews become the colonizers, conquerors and enslavers of the 56

Shmuel Trigano, Le temps de l’exil (Paris: Manuels Payot, 2001) p. 112.

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INTRODUCTION

other in the very lands where Jews began their wanderings and have everlonged to return. It thus becomes impossible to recognize or analyze the ordeal of the Marranos and their relationship to the Hispanic settlers who founded the brotherhood of the Penitentes. Nevertheless, to a certain extent, we must allow, the analysis of the minds of both colonists and so-called natives has provided us with valuable insights into the structures and consequences of power imbalances and the mechanics of selfdelusion and trance-inducement as a force for numbing sensibilities, distorting human relationships, and rationalizing acts of unthinkable evil. Given that much of the early theoretical writing on the trauma of colonialism was written by Jews from North Africa living in the midst of the French overseas regime, it is not surprising that what they say is pertinent not only to the non-Europeans, especially the Berbers and Arabs of the Maghreb, but also to Jews in general who have been internally colonized by both Christians and Muslims throughout most of the Diaspora. Further, in regard to our specific topic of secret Jews living in former parts of New Spain, these members of the Spanish and Portuguese Nation, as they often called themselves, were doubly, even triply alienated in the colonial experience: (a) first in their ambiguous and sometimes duplicitous situation as New Christians generations past the time of initial formal departure from Judaism, (b) second in their attempts to hide and find financial security in the enterprises associated with overseas colonial empires, including slavery, of which they were sometimes victims and sometimes victimizers; and (c) third in their pursuit of moral and spiritual safety away from formal Judaism and institutionalized Christianity in disguises that were doomed almost by definition to fail, such as living amongst poor, uneducated, marginalized rural folk at the fringes of the Spanish Empire.

FEMINIST AND GAY STUDIES The multicultural feminist canon has not led to independent, tolerant, diverse, or objective ways of thinking. On the contrary: It has led to conformity, totalitarian thinking, and political passivity.57

Both feminist studies and gay studies have offered radical new perspectives on history because they not only extend normal investigations of past events and personalities to include people relegated to the margins, hidden in the shadows, and erased from normative historical discourses, both in the sense of the archival 57

Phyllis Chesler, The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan 2005) p. 2.

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INTRODUCTION

documents themselves and in the academic discourses of standard historical research. In a sense, like post-colonial studies, where neglected peoples, regions and experiences have been re-integrated into normative history because the subject of history has become more dynamic, dialectical and sensitive to what is called “the other,” feminist and gay researchers have shown that past societies have included women, homosexuals and their feelings, needs and interests, however rejected, censored and abused these may have been by the dominant or hegemonic powers. Our argument, similarly, claims that Jews, including the whole gamut of fuzzy Jews we have discussed above, formed part of the tensions within the dialectic of hegemony and counter-hegemony in history; but it also goes further than supplementing what is already known and believed, through a radical act of inclusion of the despised, neglected and persecuted other. The argument claims that the dynamic of exclusion, disguise and subversion is central to understanding that history. So while Jews and Fuzzy Jews. were treated like women and homosexuals — and indeed, many of the victims of persecution were at once women, homosexuals and Jews — the understanding of history can now be seen to pivot on the tension between what can be seen and what is concealed, what is thinkable and what is inconceivable, and what is assimilated into existential reality and what is darkly felt as a fantastical or insane challenge to reality. In particular, the optics of analysis developed by feminist and gay theorists place a new emphasis on the contours, substance, governance and politics of the body, individual and collective. With all these various approaches and disciplines at our disposal — some, of course, as we have indicated, in need of disposal — we can begin our study by asking, “What did the Penitentes really do?”

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INTRODUCTION

40

C HA P T E R I

WHAT DID THE PENITENTES REALLY DO?

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CHAPTER I

My paternal grandmother told a first cousin que somos Judiós just a few weeks before mi abuela died. I always thought we were “weird” — maybe “different” would be a more polite word — because my mother’s family were supposedly Roman Catholic, but never went NEAR a church, except to sprinkle, marry, or bury. Period! No santos. No going to mass — NEVER! No rosaries, no nada. And my father’s family were Protestants, but the only part of the Bible my father read or quoted was the Old Testament, our Torah and Haftorah. Randy Baca1

1

Randy Baca, Member Closeup: “Below are her replies, in her own unique style, to a list of questions sent her recently,” Halapid 13:2 (Spring 2006) 12. (Format slightly modified.)

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What Did the Penitentes Really Do?

Let us now begin the discussion of the Penitentes with several texts, some new and some from more than a century ago that moves our preliminary argument from vague generalities and speculative paradigms to specific phenomena. These documents, precisely because they have been dismissed as unsympathetic and misunderstanding of the brotherhood, are valuable because we can better balance them against those writers who are either hermanos themselves, their close relatives, and ideologically sympathetic, with perhaps major axes to grind. It is my purpose to keep in mind that the subjects of this book are tensionridden, contentious, and anything but easy to categorize. Conger Beasley, Jr. gives one of the most complete accounts of the phenomena associated with the central ritual of the Penitentes. Here he describes in vivid terms one of the moments in the so-called “secret calvario”: Behind the pitero [flute player] come the flagellants, stripped to the waist, their faces twisted in pain, who scourge themselves with the sinewy tentacles of a multi-tipped whip, expressly to experience a measure of the grief Christ endured as He hung from the cross.2

But though he uses skilfully what the classical rhetoricians termed enargeia — the kind of vivid persuasion that creates an overwhelming image in the listener’s or reader’s mind — when Beasley goes on to cite Charles Lummis, “an early Anglo observer of native customs in the Southwest,” we realize that what we have is in all likelihood something less than an accurate, objective piece of reportage, and more 2

Conger Beasley, jr. “Among the Penitentes: Remembering an ancient Holy Week Tradition in Southern Colorado” reprinted in Colorado Springs Independent (20 April 2000) website: http://www.csindy. This section is taken from his Spanish Peaks: Lands and Legends (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 2006; 2000.)

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a sensational work of fiction. Even then, however, “fiction” does not necessarily mean untrue, and what is constructed in such vivid terms may indeed be closer to the “truth” of the Penitentes than what cautious field reports can provide. For Lumley belongs to the group that politically correct scholars today wish to keep at a distance. As a keen observer, photographer, and travel-writer, Lummis may have seen in the performance of these rites, which Beasley can only recreate from his imagination and limited first-hand experience. Lummis was also unburdened with the strictures of contemporary academic protocol, thus able perhaps to express himself freely outside of the formal terminology and frames of scientific reference imposed by the disciplines of anthropology, folklore and popular culture. While this is no guarantee that either Lummis or Beasley will be “true”, at the same time it does not mean that either is falsifying the information. Thus, writing early in the twentieth century, Lummis says, as quoted by Beasley, “The idea of the whip as a means of grace is one of the oldest in the history of nations”, and this leads him to offer examples from Herodotus and other classical historians. To make such an allusion immediately establishes a different kind of scholarly base for his remarks and sets up a perspective which is deeper and wider than most anthropological writing currently allows for. Moreover it places the Penitentes in a context of Europe’s long history rather than that of local folk traditions, counter-hegemonic popular and oral culture, and other frames of anti-Orientalist discourse. Obviously, from all that I have written so far, this is closer to the argument I wish to make than those of the followers of Edward Said or the post-modernists. The first Spanish account of such a bloody self-flagellation ritual in the New World dates from 1598, according to Lummis, occurs When Don Juan de Oñate, leading a party northward to colonize New Mexico, scourged himself in a private act of contrition on Good Friday. He stood amidst the dreary sound of doleful chanting by Franciscan friars, clothed in girdles fashioned from cactus thorns.

By 1912, Charles Francis Saunders, a traveller-journalist rather than a scholar, could send back his report on a trip he made into New Mexico by stagecoach, in which he says, . . . here was always the conventional Mexican village of adobe, clustered about a Catholic church with its cross-surmounted steeple and bell. On the outskirts of these hamlets, often in the wildest, loneliest spots, would be a rude wooden cross planted near the roadside in a heap of stones, and again on the summit of some hill whose sides were a mass of flinty stones and thorny cactus stumps, there would stand a taller cross.3 3

Charles Francis Saunders, The Indians of the Terraced Houses (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1912) reproduced online by the University of Arizona Board of Regents at http://southwest.library.arizona.edu/inte/body.1_div.10.

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What Did the Penitentes Really Do?

Though Saunders seems to fit the category of “untrustworthy” or “hostile” Anglo (American-Protestant) sources, his account is based on his own experiences and those of other personal witnesses, such as Ballard, the driver Saunders hired to take him over the mountains. According to Ballard: They are set up by the Penitentes . . . The Penitentes are a sort of Catholics who believe if they turn out in Lent stripped to the waist and walk barefooted over sharp stones, with loads of cactus packed on their bare backs, and whip themselves at the same time with whips knotted with bits of sharp iron till the blood runs off their bodies like, it’ll make up for the sins they have committed during the year. Gosh! it ought to: for I’m here to tell you cactus hurts, to say nothing of the whips and the stones.4

When Saunders asks whether this is what the Indians also do, the plain-speaking driver-guide Ballard swiftly corrects him and then carries on with further descriptions of the local customs: Not on your life . . . they’ve much too much sense. No, it’s these greaser Mexicans. Now, those hills you see with a big cross on top, they call them places Calvary, out of the Bible, and, on Good Friday, they always hold some special doings in such places, and time has been — and not long ago, either — when one of the bunch more fanatic than the rest would have himself crucified there. But the Church won’t stand for that, and they have had to cut it out, though I wouldn’t swear it isn’t yet done on the quiet. These little crosses near the road are where funerals have stopped on the way to the graveyard. Descansos they call them — that means rest — and whenever a pious Penitente comes along, he is supposed to say a prayer and chuck a stone or two on the pile at the foot of the cross to help his cousin out of purgatory; for pretty much all Mexicans are cousins.5

For Ballard, there is a clear distinction between what he calls, using the disparaging terms of the period, the “greaser Mexicans” and the Pueblo Indians, but in reality by the early twentieth century there were more ambiguous gradations between the communities, both of which were seen and treated as inferior by the incoming Anglo settlers, mostly Protestants with a puritanical distrust of Hispanics and Catholicism. These various authors, for all their biases and dubious methods, nevertheless bring to bear on the issues they deal with a set of perspectives that many of the modern academic historians lack: (1) a close, on the ground familiarity with the terrain, the people, and the events; (2) a classical background, even if only that gained from primary or secondary schooling, or perhaps “in the air” in the world before World War One; and 4 5

Saunders, The Indians of the Terraced Houses, pp. 115–116. Ibid, p. 116.

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CHAPTER I

(3) a concern to explain clearly what they see and they experience to “ordinary folk” rather than to specialists in the contemporary social sciences. The Hispanic culture that developed over four hundred years is nominally Roman Catholic but contains other features that in some instances can be traced back to indigenous customs either in Mexico or in the northern Rio Grande region where the Mexican-Hispanic culture formed itself, as well as certain new elements not to be found in either, some of which, as we shall try to show, derive from the fourth, usually overlooked influence. Opposition by the Church, first by political rivals in Mexico City and then by French-trained priests coming from Europe and the eastern coast of the United States, forced many practices of the Penitentes underground, so they appear only “on the quiet.” This secrecy itself becomes a defining quality in the brotherhood and one of the strengths intrinsic to the identity of those people who were active in the reconstitution of the brotherhood in the period after northern Mexico came under American control. Mixing Christian and other folk and indigenous religious customs, the brothers seemed to create a religious experience that is almost unique. In addition to the secrecy, the “chucking of stones” to mark rests along the funeral route suggest the elusive fourth component that is the subject of this book.6 There are a few further details reported by Saunders worthy of mention here as preliminary to our own study of the Penitentes and their relationship to New Christians. Hostile as he is to the point of view of modern scholarship, Saunders still can be taken as a fairly careful observer; while his own prejudices mark his words as loaded with the kind of value-judgments it is necessary to unpack to arrive at a more balanced appreciation of the phenomena under study here. In one place, for instance, while speaking of the local Native Americans and what remains of their Pueblos or terraced towns, the explorer remarks on the ruins of a Penitente village called Peñasco: Mexican squatters dwell on the lands by the river and a Penitente morada, or meeting place is established in the very shadow of the ancient Spanish church where San Lorenzo keeps watch and ward over his diminished flock.7

Though it seems that the Indians and the Mexicans are separate, here the evidence suggests a closer relationship and cultural mixing between the Church and the Pueblos. The morada (the word normally means “dwelling 6

7

Like other supposed remains of Jewish customary practice, e.g., dreidels, six-pointed stars, menorot, this use of stones to indicate visits to cemeteries and honour to the dead buried there, cannot be taken as prima facie evidence of continuous Jewish beliefs or memories among the communities of the southwestern USA where Penitentes operate; but are parts of an elaborate puzzle we will slowly and cautiously put together. Saunders, The Indians of the Terraced Villages, p. 118.

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place”) as a secret chapel will be discussed at length later, and its functions related back not just to European traditions but to the underground meeting room known as a kiva.8 These accounts of the violent and apparently masochistic nature of the rituals performed will have to be addressed in some detail in this and subsequent chapters. Sacred violence and festivals of blood will be shown to be anything but anomalous phenomena, and certainly not throwbacks by ignorant people to primitive or savage customs. Two other key issues, aside from the supposed shock of the archaic, need to be dealt with as well. On the one hand, there seems to be a split between informants who either suppress this aspect of the brotherhood completely, substituting a more pleasant picture of a community service organization with some devotional features, and those who dwell on the bloody rites, as though they were similar to the extremes we can still find today among Filipino penitents who crucify themselves and act out other painful rituals in Holy Week. On the other hand, writers sometimes want to treat the information from diverse periods and places as though they were variations on a single phenomenon, as though, too, this single phenomenon were either stemming from an original and whole belief-practice or, which is virtually the same thing, the variations on their way towards a modern expression of a movement and a faith that is, though somewhat different here and there, nevertheless represents a progressively evolved historical product. In what follows, I want to argue, first, that the violence — no matter how surprised or muted — is indeed the defining element in the Brotherhood at all times; and second, despite my first point, that the development of the Penitentes has not always been coherent, continuous or regular.

MEDIEVAL FLAGELLANTS “Philosophy in its original and full sense is then certainly incompatible with the biblical way of life. Philosophy and Bible are the alternatives or the antagonisms in the drama of the human soul.”9

Already it is possible to see in the examples cited at the start of this book the three usual explanations for the chronological origins and devotional functions of the ritual self-flagellation. To begin with, the practice is at once 8

9

Ruth Murray Underhill, Red Man’s America: A History of Indians in the United States, rev. ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971 [1953]) p. 210. Leo Strauss, “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 3 (19789) 114; cited by David P. Levy, Review of Martin Kavka, Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2002) on H-Judaic (March 2005). (Seen 21/07/2008)

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a specifically European Christian manifestation of sacred violence that goes back to the thirteenth-century Flagellantes, beginning in Italy in 1210;10 arising in response to plagues, famines and other crises, this mass hysteria soon spread like a contagion throughout most of Western Europe and eventually reached Iberia.11 Understanding what this kind of collective bloodletting means or how it functions in the middle of a civilized society is one thing — a study of the anthropology of culture, a history of religion, a depthpsychological analysis of troubled souls; seeing the way in which it could be used at many levels of conscious and unconscious simulation/dissimulation by diverse groups of people seeking to deny, defer, define and redefine their place in history is another — a study, such as this, with aesthetic, dramatic and witty aims in mind. Though it was opposed by the hierarchy of the Church at times, because the crowds seemed to defy civic and religious authority and threatened the good order of society, Flagellantes, as a group-experience and quasi-political movement, regained popularity and legitimacy in the sixteenth century with the formation of the so-called White, Black and Gray Penitents, and the movement became so strong that it included many nobles among its adherents and even King Henry III inscribed himself as an honorary member, and finally organized a new penitential brotherhood which was inaugurated with great pomp on March 25, 1575.12

Note that this date is just two decades earlier than Don Juan de Oñate’s 1800mile march along the Camino Real or King’s Highway into New Mexico and the recording of the first ritual flagellation in the New World.13 This action represents, usually, the medieval piety of the Spaniards in their “crusade” to christianise new territories,14 to complete the work begun in the Reconquista against the Moors in Iberia, and to fulfil the role as a Chosen People that God had set out for them, just as it had under the Old Dispensation for the Children 10

11

12

13

14

L. Bradford Prince, Spanish Mission Churches of New Mexico (Cedar Rapids, IO: The Torch Press, 1915), p. 365; available online at http://southwest.library.arizona.edu/spmc/ body.1_div.34. Cp. William Wroth who begins his study of the Penitentes and their art by asserting that “The idea of suffering as a means of purification is an integral part of every world religion” (Images of Penance, Images of Mercy, p. 5). Prince, Spanish Mission Churches, p. 367. See Wroth, Images of Penance, Images of Mercy, Chapter 2, “Penitential Practices in Medieval Europe and Spain through the Eighteenth Century” and Chapter 3 “Penitential Practises in Colonial Mexico.” Marc Simmons, The Last Conquistador: Juan de Oñate and the Settling of the Far Southwest (Norman, OK: Universiy of Oklahoma Press, 1991) p. 98. Simmons at best mentions once or twice the topic of Jews and of the Inquisition and then only in passing. He represents “the establishment” view of regional history; see pp. 39, 84, 98, etc. Simmons, The Last Conquistador, p. 96.

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of Israel. All this, as Marc Simmons puts it, echoing Américo Castro, was not only a “curious notion” but also “a towering conceit.”15 We must remind ourselves, however, that the official records are incomplete, not always reliable, and cannot therefore be taken to represent a true and full story of what happened. Earlier expeditions, from Coronado through Espejo,16 many involving the mysteriously indeterminate Jumano nation,17 may have brought Catholic rituals to the attention of the various Indian tribes encountered, and such encounters, perhaps especially when associated with the capture of slaves, may be regarded as establishing not only an awareness of Spanish religion but also of Christian cruelty, or as another unnamed author describes it as “the horrific consequences of the Spanish colonization,” hence laying the groundwork for a subversive, secret tradition in the region and among those who would either come to escape from persecution or to return to their homes, alone or with acquired wives, husbands and families. But of Oñate’s expedition, the anonymous writer for sangres.com writes, in obvious sympathy for the Pueblo point of view and with an unambiguous disdain for the Spanish intrusion, The previous Spaniards has been obvious gold-diggers but these folks were more insidious. They forced the Indians to make things for them. They forced the Indians off their land and then forced them to pay taxes on what they were allowed to keep. There were few Spanish soldiers but many of the Spanish farmers did military service in return for the rights to certain properties and the right to have Indians work the land for them. Essentially, a feudal system was in place with the Spaniards as the lords and the Indians as the serfs and slaves.18

This negative description of the encomieda system,19 whereby settlers were granted rights to govern and exploit local peoples, is written from a modern 15 16

17

18

19

Simmons, The Last Conquistador, p. 39. On the possibility that some of the men along on these early exploratory expeditions were Crypto-Jews or Marranos, see Del Hayo, History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 72. Anonymous, “Native Peoples Main How Do We Know? Who Were the Jumano? JumanoSpanish Relations . . . Who Were the Jumano? Jumano-Spanish Relations” Trans-Pecos Mountains & Basins, Texas Beyond History online at http://www.texasbeyondhistory. net/ trans-p/peoples/who.(Seen 15 August 2008). See also the continuation of that document “Who were the Jumano?” Texas Beyond History online athttp://www.texasbeyondhistory. net/trans-p/peoples/who. In addition, see Anonymous, Antonio Espejo and his Expedition of 1582–15” Southwest Crossroads Spotlight online at http://www.southwestcrossroads. org/record.php?num=902 (Seen 16 August 2008) and W.H. Timmons, “Espejo-Beltrán Expedition” The Handbook of Texas online (updated 17 January 2008) http://www. tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/EE/upe2. (Seen 15 August 2008). Anonymous, “The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Northern New Mexico. Part I” online at http:// www.sangres.com/history/pueblorevolt. (Seen 15 August 2008). On the encomienda system as a distinguishing marker of Spanish colonization (making it different from Portuguese, English and other imperial powers), see Mauricio Rivero,

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point of view, and does not do justice to the actual legal strictures imposed on the settlers and the military and ecclesiastical governors of the viceroyalty Oñate was hoping to establish as a Nuevo Mexico. While the cruelty cannot be denied, it must be pointed out that (1) not only did Oñate fail to achieve his goals but he was brought to justice before the courts by the Viceroy for his cruelties, dereliction of duties, and illegal executions; (2) the expedition was composed of very small numbers and, though they killed a disproportionate number of the Pueblo in skirmishes and larger battles, the actual impact on the existing communities was minimal until the second settlement following the Pueblo Revolt nearly a century later in 1680; (3) to speak of farmers in reference to the 1598 entrada probably overstates the case, as most of the Spanish settlers were more interested in finding silver mines and gaining the title of hidalgo than in agricultural or bucolic life. In fact, it was only much later that it was recognized that a pastoral economy was viable, whereas raising crops or herding cattle was not. As for the second major point made by sangres.com in regard to Don Juan de Oñate’s expedition, it deals with the Franciscans, and thus will take us back to our discussion of the flagellation rites. And there were the Franciscans, the missionaries who were so diligently trying to destroy all vestiges of Indian religion and supplant it with superior “Christianity.”

Here the unnamed author makes one erroneous and one very interesting point. When he speaks of the friars as working diligently to eradicate the traditional religion of the Pueblo, we have to take exception to this obvious polemical exaggeration. It is also an exaggeration that takes the friars at their own word, or at least of their historians, such as Father Juan de Escalona who “implied that the original founding expedition had been put together mainly as a convenience for the missionaries, and that Oñate and his colonists merely came along for the ride.”20 The real problem with the friars was that they were not diligent; there were too few of them to cover the whole territory under their nominal control and those who were there made at best sporadic efforts to gain converts and then to maintain pastoral care over them. This was one of the key factors in the failure of Oñate to receive financial and political backing for his desire to set up a powerful viceroyalty for himself and his heirs: neither the authorities in

20

“Mirror Images of Evangelization” Atlantic Millenium (1997) online at http://www.fiu. edu/~hisgsa/Mauricio-Mirror_Images. Simmons, The Last Conquistador p. 61.

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Mexico City nor the King and the Council of the Indies in Madrid would grant him his wishes precisely because he failed to come up with the two things they were most interested in — silver mines of a high quality as in Zacatecas21 and large numbers of souls devoted to Mother Church and the True Faith. This is not to say, of course, that the Franciscans and other friars were pious and saintly men,22 but it is to say that they could not come up with the goods to give them the power and influence they wanted and were supposed to provide for the colonial administration.23 It also needs to be said, as the anonymous author states in the second part of his essay, that The retaking of New Mexico [after the Pueblo Uprising of 1680] wasn’t very bloody. All of the Pueblos had fallen out with each other and the centuries-old feuding and bickering had taken over their societies again . . . On top of that, individuals from certain Pueblos worked with the Spanish to help them retake other Pueblos by sharing their knowledge of back door, defensive strategies, etc.24

In other words, again without diminishing the horrible consequences of this colonization by the Spaniards, it is more likely that the worst aspects came about as a result of several factors — other than diligence or imperial policy — such as misguided decisions amongst frightened and outnumbered colonists, poorly trained and resourced friars, and internal dissension and weakness among the Pueblo themselves. Yet when this same author puts inverted commas around “Christianity”, rather than the word “superior,” he suggests something more than a snide comment on the hypocrisy and cruelty of the friars. The faith they practiced, believed in, and attempted to foist on an unwilling population was questionable in 21

22

23 24

According to Alberro Solange, “If Zacatecas constitutes a zone of refuge in comparison with the central regions of the viceroyalty, New Mexico is, as [Francis V.] Scholes states, ‘a haven for social outcasts from the mining camps of Zacatecas, Santa Bárbera and Parral’ . . . That is to say, the zone of refuge from the zone of refuge.’ Indeed, it appears that New Mexico, like Zacatecas and Nuevo León before the persecutions of members of the Carvajal family, also served as a focus of settlement for a number of crypto-Jews seeking to escape arrest by the Mexican tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition” (cited in Hordes, To the End of the Earth, p. 83). Nor is it to say that there were not at least occasional Crypto-Jews or Marranos among them. Take the case of Gaspar de Carvajal, as reported by del Hayo: “native of Benaviente, born in 1556, was ordained as a priest and professed as a Dominican Friar, ‘expelled from San Estaban of Salamanca due to a suspicion there was of his lineage,’ he went to Nueva España and lived in the Convent of Santo Domingo of Mexico City; in 1591 he was living on Oaxaca and there we lose his trail” Del Hayo, History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 59). Simmons, The Last Conquistador, p. 64. Anonymous, “The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Northern New Mexico. Part II” http://www. sangres.com/istory/pueblorevolt02.

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its orthodoxy, as well as its sincerity.25 The Council of Trent, for one thing, had developed new ideas and new institutions, and the rivals of the Franciscans, the Jesuits, were far more in tune with the Counter-Reformation.26 For another, the affective pieties of the Franciscans was, almost from the death of their founder, Francis of Assisi, compromised by the division in their ranks between a small group of old believers, always at odds with regular clergy, rival preaching orders, and civil authorities, and the reformed Brotherhood that owned property, went to university, and did not live a simple and pious life of Christian charity. The ritual flagellation performed by Don Juan de Oñate’s soldiers under the tutelage of the dozen or so friars on his expedition was indeed the first recorded instance of the practice in New Mexico, but this does not mean it was a direct continuation of medieval flagellant movements nor that it was reproduced in piety or by coercion in the coming generations. The medieval mania of the Flagellants properly designated as a specific historical phenomenon and a generic religious experience is different enough in both its origins and organization to be an unlikely influence on the Penitentes found in the south-western United States. Why? Because the medieval Flagellants were a mass movement, a mania that sought to inflict on themselves and on behalf of the entire Christian society of feudal Europe penance for those sins believed to have caused disease, disorder, and poverty. In a kind of contagious spreading of the mania or enthusiasm, drawing huge crowds of men and women, old and young gathered and sought to participate in this bloody display of masochistic behaviour: they celebrated what can be called a Festival of Blood.27 The New World Penitentes, however, remained relatively few in number, maintained a certain exclusivity and even secrecy, and sought to imitate Christ’s Passion as a defining ritual in their brotherhoods which were established to take the place of or at least supplement the missing, inefficient or hostile offices of the friars and regular clergy. What are carried forward from one specific historical manifestation of sacred blood-letting to another local religious phenomenon nonetheless are (a) a particular sense of physical and emotional intensity that centres the sense of spiritual fervour into the body as a site of penitential piety and therefore (b) an affective experience that provides identity for masses of people who otherwise seem alienated from formal ecclesiastical and social institutions. In addition, as the Middle Ages gives way to the Renaissance and 25

26 27

Leandro Karnal, O Teatro da Fé — Formas de Representação Religiosa no Brasil e no México no século XVI — Tese selecionada pelo departamento de História da Universidade de São Paulo para a série Teses, da área de História Social. São Paulo, Editora Hucitec, 1998.) online at http://www.fflch.usp.br/dh/ceveh/public.html/biblioteca/livros/teatrp_fe/index (Seen 17 June 2005). Karnal, O Teatro da Fé, p. 6. Norman Simms, Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice in Biblical and Classical Literature (London, ONT: Sussco Publications, 2007).

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Reformation (including the Counter-Reformation) both sets of bloody ritual celebrations seem to raise the anxiety and disgust of re-constituted authority which therefore seeks to control or abolish the mass/popular movements that develop. Flagellation within penitential rituals cannot be seen as anything but a traditional part of Catholic tradition, at least until the Counter-Reformation when there are stirrings of an alternative rational attempt to regularize the activity, to restrict its intensity so as to keep the symbolic meanings uppermost, and eventually to keep it from being a primary or defining aspect of private worship. While elsewhere in Catholic Europe religious practices tended to shift towards inwardness, regularity and secularism, in the Iberian kingdoms “religion still ordered all aspects of life” with fervour, zeal, and bigotry.28 Such intensity of religious expression was transported to New Spain, and from thence into the northern fringes of what was known even then New Mexico.29 Therefore, the Penitentes in the south-western region of the USA do not have to be connected by any formal or direct filiations with the Flagellants in Europe during the Middle Ages, no more than they are outgrowths or continuations of any other penitential brotherhoods that practice this rite as part of their devotional discipline. However, these disciplinas should not be considered antiCatholic acts or as eruptions of archaic violence into a wild and savage region of the world. As we shall attempt to show, they are specific realizations of deferred and displaced transformative rites, partly substitutes for Eucharistic ceremonies impossible without the presence of proper ecclesiastical functionaries, partly midrashic extensions and reconfigurations of complex new memorial acts.

THIRD ORDER OF FRANCISCANS Thus, an aesthetics of excess, eccentricity, disproportion, non-balance, monstrosity, and stupendousness became the hallmark of the Baroque: la estetica de stupare.30

Another standard and popular explanation of the Penitentes grows from the historical importance of the Franciscans as the major and sometimes the only Catholic order charged with overseeing the missionary and pastoral care of the territories of what are now New Mexico, Arizona and southern Colorado. But as 28 29

30

Wroth, Images of Penitence, Images of Mercy, p. 18. In this sense, New Mexico does not refer to the state within the USA, but to what was assumed to be an enormous unexplored territory that stretched from the Mississippi River westwards to the Pacific coast and sometimes even as northwards to Newfoundland. Rolf P. Lessenech, “The ‘Metaphysicals’: English Baroque Literature in Context.”

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with continuity of the brotherhood to medieval institutions, the relationship of the Hispanic group to the Third Order of Franciscans is tenuous and ambiguous, at best. We may say that the friars taught and practiced self-flagellation in their model of missionary teaching most appropriate to conversion of Native Americans, but they did not found or control the brotherhoods that subsequently developed and which, despite several names, eventually formed more cohesively into the Penitentes in the recognizable shape we see in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Yet, whatever the intentions of the brothers to gain legitimacy and then regain ecclesiastical approval, they found that their actions seemed like a stupendous affront to the Church and the State, and consequently they also had to step-up their efforts to hide their performances, deny publicly that they did what they were accused of doing — and that their parents and grandparents had been photographed or filmed doing — and put in place another image of themselves, one that was partly true, to be sure, but neither the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That is, photographs from the late nineteenth century show hermanos both flagellating one another and tying a brother to the cross. A few years later, after the turn of the century, there are pictures of wooden effigies being crucified. Today, one finds either no photographic evidence at all or only painted banners and altar-pieces depicting the Passion, while members of the Penitentes disavow altogether the existence of such rites or remain silent and keep their disciplines out of the public view. But it was not always so. The transformation in sensibility and imagination needs to be explained. One of the means by which affectivity outside the strict control and official theology of the Church seemed to find a restricted place in Europe was through Franciscan piety. The strange and often bizarre activities and public manifestations of St Francis and his followers first seemed to cross into regions of heretical behaviour and outlandish belief, so much so that, once the founder himself disappeared from the scene, the order he established, and the limited recognition provided by the Papacy, seemed to totter on the verge of disappearance as well. The second wave of friars consequently sought to present themselves as a more orderly, intellectual and institutionalized movement, with many of the extreme or radical measures instituted by Francis modified or transformed into more acceptable terms. Even in this more respectable manifestation, however, the increasingly educated and orderly Franciscans were seen as dangerous challenges to the authority of parish priests who claimed exclusive right to hear confession and collect tithes and university officials who saw the entrance of these new preachers and lecturers as undermining the scholastic enterprise. It was also in the very popularity of the Franciscan public preaching and performance of penitential rites to crowds of laymen in Italian towns and cities usually neglected by traditional ecclesiastical organizations that the bishops and higher princes 54

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of the Church feared the dangers of rebellion and revolution. Such popular and dramatic interaction with ordinary men and women in the streets aroused new expectations in the crowds in terms of a messianic communism and apocalyptic overturning of feudal power. Hence the need to establish a third order within the movement, an organization of lay folk beyond that of the Franciscan Brothers themselves and the Sisters of St Claire. Rather than spontaneous or merely enthusiastic crowds of flagellants who came into being in times of social or religious crisis, the new order would regularize the community under Franciscan control. L. Bradford Prince sees a strong connection between the Third Order of St. Francis and the foundation of what we now call the Penitentes in the northern most territories of New Spain. He writes, The Third Order of St. Francis is composed of laymen, and was very general among the people of New Mexico during all the Spanish era. The Franciscan priests naturally and properly encouraged the growth of the Third Order, which sought to carry the principles of St. Francis of Assisi into the life of the laity; and for two centuries nearly every leading citizen became a member of the Third Order.31

The Third Order of Franciscans — third after the male and female orders of religious vocation — was brought to America with the missionizing zeal of the Church and the intense affective feelings of the Spanish soldiers and administrators. As the Franciscans were not only among the most numerous of the religious orders moving into the region of New Mexico and southern Colorado,32 but also virtually in control of the colonial administration,33 their influence was extremely significant. Just as the friars themselves often impinged upon the prerogatives of the regular clergy and attained to a popularity that threatened the governance of episcopal territories in Italy and parts of Spain, so the lay exuberance of the Third Order seemed at times to create “a parallel, competing liturgy performed solely by the laity,” particularly in regard to penitential processions.34 As the murals painted by indigenous artists at the monastery of San Miguel in Huejotzingo (Puebla) show, penitential 31 32

33

34

Prince, Spanish Mission Churches, p. 369. “Franciscan Father Jacinto de San Francisco wrote a document in 1561 referring to the area as New Andalusia which gave New Mexico its first name. In 1581, Franciscan lay brother Augustin Rodriguez, along with two other Franciscans and Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado, travelled northward on the Rio Grande and named the area The Kingdom of San Felipe” (in an unsigned essay, “Religion in New Mexico,” santafe.com: New Mexico Online Magazine at http:/losala. zebotech.com/history/religion_new_mexico). Michael K. Ward, “The Pueblo Region: From Ancient Origins to Popé, and the Reconquista of New Mexico”(4 February 2003) online at http://jome.att.net/~michael.k.ward/ history369 pueblosreconquista. Susan V. Webster, “Holy Week Processions in Spain and New Spain: The Case of Huejotzingo” online at file://A:SusanVWebster.

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processions in Mexico from the sixteenth century on were, according to Susan V. Webster, in many ways like those in Spain and stressed “flagellants, whipping themselves in expiation of their sins.” These performers were not like the earlier flagellants of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, first, insofar as they were incorporated into Franciscan worship and devotion to the True Cross, and, second, the acts of self-violence were contextualized by the theology of the friars’ penitential humility and practice of imitatio christi. It is only when such practice of extreme devotion is separated from monasteries and ecclesiastical control, which we will see happening several times in the development of the Brotherhood of the Penitentes, that Franciscan influence is overtaken by other formative and functional requirements. Like the most fanatical of the Franciscan friars who whipped and stigmatized themselves and their fellows in a collective imitatio Christi in order to demonstrate their faith and endurance — and their challenge to the shamanic violence of the Pueblo rites — the Penitentes sought to re-experience in their own persons the tortures inflicted on Jesus and to display to each other this exemplary suffering as a sign of social bonding and identity. They did this moreover not within a Franciscan framework of organization or paradigm of theology, although clearly the dominance of the friars within the region, even though few in number and irregular in visitations, plays a part in providing familiar models for the Hermandad to develop in its own unique ways. Unlike the Franciscans, however, the brotherhood did not seek to missionize or to manifest any sacramental powers of transfiguration. As we shall see, when they are juxtaposed to Pueblo shamanism, these penitential ordeals serve different social and psychological purposes — or in the special case of the Marranos, at least, provide a complex and dynamic, as well as bloody, image of historical deformation, to make of one’s own blooded and torn body a lieu de memoire of Crypto-Jewish guilt and suffering.35

35

Julia Boltan Holloway “Hazelnuts and Olive Leaves: Julian’s Trinity. Lee Abbey Advent Retreat” (1997/2005) online at file://HazelnutsandOliveleavesJulian’sTrinityLeeAbbey. For instance, she writes, “In New Mexico the Penitentes lived over a hundred years without the sacraments of the church lacking any priest, but carried on their religious practices amongst the laity by forming medieval burial societies and celebrating Christmas as the Pastores seeking the Christ Child in all the homes, and at Easter carrying great crosses, one of the number being chosen to hang upon the cross.”

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AZTEC, MEXICAN, PUEBLO, SHAMANISTIC RITES AND SECRET SOCIETIES AMONG NATIVE AMERICANS Even though Nevuchadnesar killed many of Egypt’s Jews, the Jewish nation will never be destroyed (Malbim). These words reassure the Jew that even when the Jew is wandering in exile, writes R’ Joseph Breuer, for he perceives “even the most terrible blows of fate as manifestations of that ever loving and disciplining Divine Providence which, by its unwillingness to let any wrongdoing go unpunished, shows the care and concern with which G-d strives to improve and uplift the children of [Yakov].”36

In a third layer of influence the Penitentes and their bloody rituals are occasionally attributed to the shamanic rites of the Native Americans who were encountered, converted, and often exploited and impoverished by the colonial regime. Spanish chroniclers report that in the first generations of contact between Europeans and the Pueblo and other local Native peoples there was distrust and antagonism, and, despite formal attempts by the Council of the Indies to prevent the kind of conflicts that accompanied the actions of the original Conquest by Cortes and his cohorts, wars broke out. Rebel leaders, often with religious agendas, rose up and led the indigenous peoples to push out the invaders. On the whole, though, troubled relations with imperial military agents and missionary priests and friars did not establish good grounds for sustained and mutual interests in the new settlements. In due course, over several generations, growth and stabilization of Hispanic colonization also provided opportunities for a modicum of interest in each other’s customs. We also know that New Christian toleration of otherness was stronger than Spanish hostility to otherness, especially among “primitive savages and pagans.” But it is more than likely that unofficial cooperation continued between small groups of settlers and the Indians before and even after the uprisings against Spanish colonial intrusions Nevertheless, attempts to describe the formation of the brotherhood in terms of a merging of two cultural forces — Spanish-Mexican Franciscans, on the one hand, and shamanistic Pueblo customs, on the other — tend to falter on the dynamic complexity of the actual historical circumstances in the region.37 36

37

Shlomo Katz, ed. “Parashat Bo” Hamayan/The Torah Spring 6: 15 (No. 249) (6 Shevat/11 January 1992). Spelling here follows Orthodox and Chasidic practice. For a quick overview of this history, see Linda Cordell, with material by Matthew Schmader, “Heritage and Human Environment: Hispanic Influence,” Albuquerque’s Environmental Story online at http://www. cabq.gov/aes/3hsp. For example: “Following the conquest of

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Looked at from within the encounters themselves, whether by Spanish clerics or by Indian informants recorded in our own times, the event is fraught with spiritual and magical elements. It was not a matter of a European literate elite confronting an indigenous oral-based culture and so of absolute incompatibility between a modern and a pre-modern society; rather, each side tended to believe the other, insofar as they were able, and yet to miscalculate on the real powers they could draw on from the supernatural world. For example, the Zuni recall an early encounter between the Spaniards and one of their own, Bynehahthle, a Bow Priest who was suspected of being a sorcerer. When the Spanish troops came, the Zuni told of Bynehahthle killing off most of his people. He did not actually kill anyone, but with his powers he enabled himself to cast spells on people, making them ill. When the troop’s leader was informed of this he took the man into custody and wrote to his superiors in Mexico, telling of a man possessed of powers of the unnatural.38

Though the authorities in Old Mexico ordered the shaman arrested and brought to their headquarters to be punished, his actual appearance before the Spanish commander is such that he is released and sent home. “He was given a cane supposed to be blessed with supernatural powers with which he could bring prosperity, happiness, and peace to his people.”39 But this kind of mutuality, as it were, did not always work out peacefully. The Spanish regime proved more violent, abusive, and exploiting than the Indians could have imagined, despite their words and symbolic claims of Christian love. The Pueblo themselves were also not always amenable and submissive to the colonial troops, administration, or friars, and continued to practice violent and bloody rituals — and sometimes warfare — which the Mexicans could not accept and sought to crush. One Zuni recalls, So few were brought up with this knowledge and in my younger days when I participated in many rituals, I knew by instinct when a scalping would take place and what would follow. But the rituals would be kept in secrecy, especially when the Ahauda were involved, for they were a law unto the rituals.40

38

39 40

Mexico, Spanish explorers moved north into what is now New Mexico. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado led the first expedition into the Rio Grande Valley in 1540. Expeditions led by Francisco Sanchez Chumascado and Antonio de Espejo followed in 1581 and 1582. Permission to establish the first Spanish colony was given to Don Juan Oñate, and in 1598 he brought the first colonists to San Gabriel (near present-day San Juan Pueblo)., etc., etc.” It should be noted that this official chronological history omits the role of Gov. Carvajal and the New Christians who sought refuge in the new northern territories. The Pueblo of Zuni, “17. Mexicans who Captured a Zuni Man” in The Zuni: Self Portrayals by the Zuni People (New York: Mentor/New American Library, 1972) p. 58. “Mexicans who Captured a Zuni Man” p. 60. “31. True Way of the Scalp Dance,” The Zunis: Self Portrayals, p. 116.

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And a little later this same oral informant claims, indicating the precariousness of the traditions once the continuity of the old culture has been broken apart by invasion and missionary zeal: For some time these rituals, even some social ceremonials, were almost abolished by the influence of the Spaniards, but as the ceremonies once more began to take place, the old people like me began to function as the leaders of the societies. And because we have kept our knowledge and preserved our ways, we have been kept in our posts of leadership, for rarely does a young person wish the knowledge we have to himself. One does not learn by keeping silent for I too had to inquire of many persons, some who no longer are among us, people like Hoonki who had learned from his father the true forms of expressing what we believed in.41

There is more, however, than forgetting and re-learning involved in these oral memories of how the Zuni and other Pueblo Indians attempted to counteract the Spanish influence and interference: once the unquestioned comprehensiveness of mythical thinking had been punctured, there could be no seamless continuity — nor any way to censor out the return of the repressed traumatic hurts of the original encounters themselves. In New Mexico as in the Aztec and other aboriginal lands of Old Mexico, Robert Coles points out, Soon missionary work among the Indians began, and by 1598 Juan de Oñate had thoroughly colonized what is now New Mexico. The missionaries set about destroying the ceremonial practices of the Indians — if necessary by force. Religious structures were raided, ceremonial masks and costumes were seized. Leaders of villages were arrested, silenced, and sometimes executed. The Pueblos were robbed of their food supplies and handicrafts — tributes to their conquerors and to the missionary “teachers.” Large churches were built with Indian labor; baptism and attendance at church were obligatory.42

In subsequent years, while the Indians would try to conduct their old pagan rites secretly in underground chambers called kiva, their purpose being to induce trance-like states of ecstasy for revelatory, therapeutic and other traditional purposes, they also externalized the deep-seated and extremely painful ambiguities — or rather, anamorphoses or contrafactions — that mark the experiences and psyches of the Marranos we have to focus on in our study of the Penitentes. It should be clear that the Crypto-Jews were more like those indigenous peoples43 than the Hispanics who experienced their new conditions as part of the very identity-constructing history they were part of. 41 42

43

“True Way of the Scalp Dance,” p. 118. Robert Coles, “Afterward” in The Zunis: Self Portrayals, p. 204. This, originally an essay published in The New Yorker Magazine in 1973, was published in the Mentor Book version of the book produced by the University of New Mexico. Frank Waters, “Introduction”, Book of the Hopi (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963) p. xvii.

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These developments have to be explained in at least two ways. First, as examples of anamorphoses, they indicate a technology of dissimulation through distortion, as in paintings and architecture where familiar faces, objects and places are stretched out and squashed down into almost unrecognizable shapes and only recognizable by use of mirrors or odd angles of view. Thus fruit and vegetables may suddenly reveal sacred scenes or mountains when the image is turned on its side become kings or queens, death-heads or prancing horses. In the trope of contrafaction melodies or modes appropriate to erotic or bacchanalian festivity may be used at a slower pace or in a minor key for liturgical singing of hymns, so that again the familiar is made uncanny, the mundane turned into a vehicle for a subversive antinomian mysticism, or a pro forma repetition of sacrality from one culture carries with it a entirely new and shocking breakthrough of another. However, if we are to believe José Faur, Jewish attitudes differed considerably from those of Christian in these encounters, with greater tolerance, sympathy and desire to ally with ways of life that seemed, from a particular angle of biblical history, familiar. This is not to say that New Christians were always willing to forgo legal and commercial ties with the government in Mexico City for the sake of friendly relations with Pueblo Indians — or even if they were willing, were able to overcome the fear and mistrust of the other that they wished to identify with. From the chronicles what we can occasionally see is that the same men accused of instigating or provoking violent reactions from the Indians by the use of excessive cruelty or trickery in commercial deals were, in fact, those denounced as Judaizers. It would seem, then, that we have to do more than take these charges with a grain of salt; we see in them traditional slanders of anti-Semitism. That the new settlers, not excluding the disproportionate number of Marranos among them, had occasional friendly (read: “intimate”) relations with the local people is also verifiable, though intermarriage and permanent sharing of living space probably comes much later than the initial contacts. If we go right back to the formation of the Mexican-Hispanic character, personality-type, cultural self-images that lie right in the core of the phenomena we are looking at, then we need to remember that the Aztecs were obsessed by the concept of death, and that the Spanish conquistadors reinforced that “tendency to dwell on death with ‘morbid insistence’,” as Marvin Goldwert says, citing William L. Schurz.44 Everyone knows how the Spaniards were horrified at the human sacrifices carried out at the great temple in Mexico City, where thousands of captives had their hearts torn out by priests, and everyone has 44

Marvin Goldwert, “History — Avant-Garde: A Collage on the Mexican Obsession with Death,” Mentalities/Mentalités 4:1 (1987) 5.

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probably seen magazine or video images of contemporary Mexican processions of skeletons and other death-figures. But it is not clear how one leads to the other, except as Goldwert has tried to trace out the mutual trauma of conquistadors and Aztecs in what he calls kairotic time based on the concept of kairos: For Freud, a given life history, even as a given group history, must be examined in terms of the experience of crucial events occurring at a specific historical time. What is crucial needs to have happened early. There had to be a Kairos, that crucial time in the past that is decisive for what then must come after . . . 45

It is not just that kairotic time is not measured in equivalent units as chronological time is, but that kairos marks “a traumatic event in group history” and is a time that is “time-felt over time-measured” in terms of a painful reshaping of the individual and the group experience of all subsequent events in time. The imagery of the Aztec blood sacrifices intersected with the bloody scenes of the conquest, with the Spaniards soaring high on a crest of bloody exaltation and the Aztecs and their descendants put down by the bloody humiliation of defeat and enslavement: and these two bloody experiences of the conqueror and the conquer flowed together into the painful creation of the Mexican character. R. Díaz Guerrero puts the result neatly: . . . a dramatic interpersonal interaction lies at the historical roots of the Mexican socioculture. Early in the sixteenth century, a few hundred Spaniards conquered a land inhabited, according to the historians, by eight million Indians. Its whole sociocultural background is based upon the union of a conqueror — the powerful male, the Spaniard — and the conquered — the female, the subjugated Indian . . .46

Goldwert attempts to add the dimension of the psychological, or the psychohistorical to this sociocultural view of the forging of a profoundly conflicted Mexican national character by seeing the trauma of conquest occurring in the special time of kairos, that is, what he also terms history-as-neurosis: “Conquest was a time of rebellion over obedience, charisma over bureaucracy, action over law. This tension lurked beneath the surface of colonial stability.”47 It manifested itself not only in the distortion of personalities, so that machismo bravado became more shrill as the reality of subordination and powerlessness became evident, but also in the construction of street processions of flagellating penitents, fiestas dedicated to death, and other aspects of the obsession with death — both the exaltation of male potency over fear of death and the cruel abuse of women and children in a ritualized punishment of the female within 45

46 47

Marvin Goldwert, “Time, Symbol, and Cycle in Mexican History: New Approaches to the Past,” Mentalities/Mentalités 5:2 (1988) 31. Cited in Goldwert, “Time, Symbol and Cycle” 32. Goldwert, “Time, Symbol and Cycle” 33.

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and the feminine without who betrayed the Mexican’s archaic self-image of bloody masculine pride.48 The consequences of the trauma on those of Jewish background, whether or not these New Christians held any Crypto-Jewish beliefs or consciously performed the judaizing practices they were often accused of, were not exactly the same. When, too, Frank Waters writes that the Hopi suffered their domination by European powers “with aloofness and secrecy”,49 he does not exactly mean what is meant by those words in association with the Marranos. For those Portuguese or Spanish conversos who identified with and served the Spanish imperial regime, like Juan de Oñate (indirectly and distantly descended from but himself tied by more recent marriage-alliances with other New Christian clans) and Luis de Carvajal (who also may have been an Old Christian who only married a Crypto-Jew)50 the persecution would have been shocking, insulting, and enraging,51 while for those like his nephew, Carvajal 48

49 50

51

Cp. Marvin Goldwert, “Hernán Cortés, Snake-Symbolism, and the Blending of Literary and Psychohistory: A Note on the Quetzalcoatl Legend,” Mentalities/Mentalités 3:1–2 (1985) 24–25. Waters, “Introduction,” Book of the Hopi, p. xvii. Eugenio del Hayo in the History of El Nuevo Reino de Leon (1577–1723), translated by Edna G. Brown, cites “a curious legend” reported by Chas K. Landis in 1894 from Vito Allessio Robles: “Don Luis de Carvajal was an extremely rich Jew, the son of a Hebrew father and Greek mother, who had been born in Mogodorio at the line [border] of Portugal and that during the 1570s he had travelled to la Nueva España where he had undertaken great businesses which permitted him to increase the great fortune inherited from his father . . . Carvajal, with his colonists, most of them Jews, to whom some friars had attached themselves, founded a city around the springs of Santa Lucia and, right away, for the area he published some Jewish ordinances prohibiting the use of the cesspools, establishing that the streets should be wide and bordered by trees and imposing punishment for those who would destroy these . . . He had also established a synagogue . . . The colony prospered but the Spaniards, so the legend states, were not happy about . . . having [no] encomiendas, and the friars about the establishment of the synagogue ordered to be erected by Carvajal and the Jewish practices to which the major part of [the] Portuguese colonists dedicated themselves, and they schemed against the governor . . . ” (Chapter 3, “The Foundations of Monterrey,” p. 22). Del Hayo’s own version of the Jewishness of the settlers brought by Carvajal seems a mixture of (a) confused understanding of who and what New Christians were and (b) stereotypical aspersions against Jews, even those who had suffered the ignominy of forced conversion (History of Neuvo Reino, p. 34). Del Hayo continues citing the legend of Luis de Carvajal the Elder’s Jewishness: “In agreement with this same tradition, Carvajal answered that he was truly a Jew and was proud of it and that, furthermore, King Felipe II knew, perfectly well, this circumstance when he named him governor of el Nuevo Reino de León” and then Carvajal denies categorically each of the slanders raised against him, admitting, however, that he did forbid enslaving the Indians, establishing schools “removed from the action of the cleric [clergy]” and similar progressive, liberal matters in accord with his Jewish morality (History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 23). That he was a cruel slave-master, a wife-beater, a corrupt official — all of that smacks of racial hatred and bigotry (History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 34).

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el Mozo,52 and members of the extended family53 he had brought with him from Spain, who may or may not have been consciously practicing CryptoJew before their arrest by the Inquisition, the consequences of persecution were to intensify opposition to Christianity and either open commitment to Judaism — accepting martyrdom (kiddush ha-Shem, Sanctification of the Name) or drastic attempts to escape the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, with further strategies of deceit and disguise. Certainly, as we view the denunciations against the older Carvajal by his rivals and enemies, the case against him seems like nothing less than a tissue of traditional anti-Semitic smears: they attack his integrity as a governor, his morality as a husband and father, and his propensity for anti-clericalism and criticism of the sacraments.54 On the other hand, as Del Hay points out, “he suffered from delirium of persecution and delirium of grandeur”55 and then characterizes him as “a man choleric, furious, and agitated.”56 Delirio, we know, is a word attached to the inhabitants of Monterrey and Neuva León even to this day, and the reason is usually that there are so many Jews still living there — in an underground way. But it is it just that Jews lived there, since there is no essential Jewishness about delirium; instead, the phenomena associated with such madness and disintegration of personalities were consequent to what Del Hayo cites a contemporary chronicler, Alonso de León, as describing: “the life of constant danger and the violent environment in which those first settlers lived . . .”57 Psychologically, the picture of Hispanic arrogance and Jewish delirium58 is even more complicated and probably became more so with each generation as 52 53

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55 56 57 58

Del Hayo, History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 39. Del Hayo estimates there were 77 persons who came on several ships to follow Luis de Carvajal, most directly from Spain, a few from Portugal, and others from Italy and around the Mediterranean (History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 66). Anecdotes, such as those that tell of Don Luis going into a rage and slapping his sister Doña Francisca Núnez de Carvajal, when she said, during prayer, “that there was no Christ,” may spring from two causes, other than the simple one given in the reports against him: (a) he reacted quickly to stop his sister from calling attention to her true feelings and so endangering the family and the already fragile security of the political situation; (b) the ever-present familiares of the Inquisition deliberately distort the truth. After all, as Del Hayo tells us, “This incident was the cause of which, five years later (1589) Don Luis would be processed by the Inquisition, the same as all his relatives.” (History of the El Nuevo Reino, p. 37). Del Hayo, History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 31. Ibid, p. 37. Ibid, p. 38. If all Spanish men in Mexico in the colonial Mexico were likely to be arrogant and violent, as is the way with conquistadors, then there were Jews who stood out and were called cruel, corrupt and congenital liars, for reasons we have touched on several times already, but which may be, finally, not due to the “mythomania” or persecution complex they suffered under, but to the sheer prejudice of contemporary witnesses and modern scholarship. See del Hayo’s comments on Luis de Carvajal: “We do not believe it necessary

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the memory of Crypto-Judaism and of direct persecution faded. The tendency towards machismo and the exaltation of death found in the emergent Mexican personality-type would also be manifest amongst Marrano individuals and families, first, because adoption of these traits was a concomitant of blending in with the dominant society; second, because, behaving like everyone else was a sine qua non of hiding one’s ancestry and current ambiguities or secret beliefs; and third, because both traits could serve particular functions within the specific circumstances of Marranism itself.

A FURTHER SPECULATION: OR, A SHOT IN THE DARK Keep your imagination under control. You must sometimes correct it, sometimes assist it. For it is all important for your happiness and balances reason. The imagination can tyrannize, not being content with looking on, but influences and even often dominates our life. — Baltasar Gardia y Morales59 Because at the realm of the conventional there is no internal criterion by which to distinguish “good/ evil,” the world of conventionality, like its matrix, imagination depends on authority and violence, that is, on a political system with power to enforce “the normative.” — José Faur60

On a rather obscure website of the internet, in a series of brief essays by an unnamed hand, there appear some speculations which come close to the approach this whole book takes, but without the attempt at psychohistorical analysis nor of rabbinic analysis. This site goes by the name of sangres.com and proclaims it is “For Your Daily Dose of the Mountains.” In one of these essays, with the title, “Los Hermanos Penitente: The Penitente Brotherhood”61 the

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to complicate things, Carvajal lied just to lie, his mythomania was taking him fatally to it” (History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 65). Baltasar Gracian y Morales, Oraculo. José Faur, Homo Mysticus: A Guide to Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University press, 1999) p. 61. Anonymous, “Los Hermanos Penitente: The Penitente Brotherhood”sangres.com For Your daily Dose of the Mountains (2008) at http://www.sangres.com/history/penitente01 (Seen 11/08/2008).

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anonymous author makes the following statements, which I will gloss in such a way as to bring them into line with themes already discussed earlier in this chapter: 1. At the top of the very stratified layers of Southern Colorado and New Mexican society were the Spanish hidalgos and other noblemen. Below them, the full-blooded Pueblo Indians. “At the bottom of the heap were the genizaros, considered marginal people by the rest of society because of their slave and former slave status.” These people were “the socially dead” and whether actually in the state of servitude or released from their ten or twenty years of bondage, they could never be properly be considered “a living person.” 2. Like the Cagots in south-western France, particularly in the borderlands of the Pyrenees, these walking dead persons could only communicate within Roman Catholic celebrations in a separate or “other” way. Cagots had separate doors to enter a church, their own lesser baptismal fonts, and secret places to worship. The genizaros, we are told in this essay, “were, essentially, cast out of the Church.” These outcast persons, however, include more than the slaves and former slaves this site speaks of, insofar as the people who moved north into the New Realm or New Mexico that lay beyond the Rio Grande river were not always registered by the officers in charge or sought to travel with established bodies of colonists. 3. Though the Franciscan friars had introduced their own style of missionary teaching and performed public acts of penitential self-discipline, they concentrated their efforts on attempting to convert and maintain their pastoral control over the native Pueblos and other Indians within their domain. They spent little or no time caring for the “others” outside the few small towns of the colonial provinces. The genizaros were not only separated and neglected, they had to create their own religious means of explaining their condition and creating substitute rites for the orthodox mass they could not participate in. 4. The anonymous author of this essay on sangres.com claims that they “reintegrated themselves into Spanish society through flagellation and ritual death.” They developed a series of rituals centred on the myth of Exodus, stories and moving pictures of themselves as the Children of Israel “being led out of darkness into light, as brothers of darkness becoming brothers of light over time.” In these sacred performances, now denied and structurally forgotten by their heirs, but yet evident in the themes and icons of their alabados and other remaining processional hymns, they imagine themselves as purging themselves of the darkness in their souls through acts of enlightenment. The main structure of this myth, we are told “was introduced in New Mexico by the Franciscan friars in their project to Christianize the natives, started back in 1598,” that is, with the entrada led 65

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5.

6.

7.

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by Don Juan de Oñate, but it also may very well be — as we attempt to show over the next several chapters — that similar patterns of ritual and mythic penitence can derive from other sources. In fact, as Stanley M. Hordes points out, the assumption that this first governor of New Mexico must have been of limpieza de sangre, that is, of pure Christian blood unstained by Moorish or Jewish connections, is precisely that, a mere assumption. The records show instead that Don Juan de Oñate was descended from conversos, and significantly he was a member of the family of the Ha-Levis whose history we shall discuss more closely later in this book when we deal with the Santa Maria clan. Here it is sufficient to anticipate that discussion by citing José Antonio Esquibel: “Several of the Ha-Levi progeny proved to be exceptional individuals in the Jewish community of Burgos and their conversion to Christianity precipitated their establishment as a socially, politically, economically, and religiously influential extended family.”62 Through this tie and several others with leading Sephardic credentials, Juan de Oñate cannot be taken as a neutral figure: but must be seen within a network of Marrano influences operative throughout the foundational period of both the old and the new Mexico. What these connections mean, however, is more difficult to ascertain, since it is not just blood and vague memory that count: the converso families made efforts to gain royal and occasionally papal confirmation in their status as loyal members of the Church and the State, not obliteration of the original fact of conversion but recognition that the genealogical roots go back into the Hebrew tribe that gave birth to the Virgin Mary — and that migration to Spain occurred prior to the Crucifixion, hence absolving the New Christians from any continuing guilt in deicide.63 It is also now clear that many — certainly not all — of the colonists and soldiers and perhaps some of the friars who gathered to march with Don Juan into the new territory were also of converso stock. They were, as Hordes puts it, “eager to join an enterprise that would take them to a remote corner of the empire” at precisely a time (the 1590s) of “the most intense phase of the inquisitorial persecutions” in Mexico.64 Furthermore, each time the expedition was delayed and forced to recruit new soldiers, settlers, and friars the numbers of New Christians increased.65 Some of these Sephardic newcomers arrived from reconstituted rabbinical communities in France, Esquibel cited in Stanley M. Hordes, To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (New York, NY: Columbia University Press 2005) p. 107. Ibid, p. 109. Ibid, p. 111. Ibid, pp. 112ff.

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Italy66 or Holland and some from areas of Marrano refuge such as the Canary Islands.67 These families tend to have suffered from the earliest days of their conversion in Spain and Portugal and right through the sixteenth century in Mexico because of their ancestral identities. Hordes indicates that other members of the Oñate family assigned the task for recruitment and supervision of these replacements, such as the governor’s brother Alonso de Oñate, had the difficult job of protecting such men, women, and children from the prying eyes of the Inquisition.68 These agents of the would-be viceroy of New Mexico also had to deal with officers of the Holy Office charged with inspection of arriving cargo for “the books carried by gente sopechosa (suspicious people), “particularly applying this appellation to the Portuguese and other foreigners on board”.69 Finally, to sum up his account of the Oñate expedition, Hordes writes: Among those who persevered were the descendants of crypto-Jews who had successfully evaded arrest by the Inquisitions of Spain, Portugal and Mexico, by finding refuge in this remote community. Over the succeeding decades, they would be joined by more coreligionists, some of whom would find relative peace and security, while others would find their ethnicity and observances tangled up in the nasty web of frontier politics.70

Alerted to this large number of Fuzzy Jews in the expeditions north and in the zones of refuge along the way and beyond the official markers of imperial control, we can now address the questions associated with the foundation and development of the Penitentes. This brotherhood is doubtless Catholic in its core and its primary goals, just as its membership is overwhelmingly made of Hispanics with impeccable credentials. However, the order comes into being in a time and in a place that are not like all other parts of Latin America, and its development as a secret organization also marks it out as unusual among religious movements along the fringes of the Spanish world. One of the most important factors in the development of the Penitentes as separate brotherhoods is, according to our unnamed writer, “Los Hermanos’ rituals were completely separated from the Church and established in moradas 66

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Of the Carvajal family that suffered martyrdom in the Inquisition in Mexico, only two brothers, Baltasar Rodriguez (alias Francisco Ramìrez) and Miguel de Carvajal, managed to escape, “fleeing to Spain and from there to oriental [i.e., eastern] Europe; in 1595 they were in Rome and, afterwards, went to Salónica, where Baltasar took the name of David Lumbroso [the enlightened] and Miguel that of Abraham Lumbroso and they ‘were great Rabbis’ . . . ” (Del Hayo, History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 59). Hordes, To the End of the Earth, p. 118. Ibid, p. 121. Ibid, p. 122. Ibid, p. 123.

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maintained by the confraternity without ecclesiastical oversight.” Indeed, my suggestion is that such oversight was deliberately avoided, at least by a certain number of the brothers, those who were escaping from supervision by Church and State for reasons of their own71 — and not just because they had been stigmatised as slaves, found guilty of criminal offences, sought to separate themselves from unpleasant domestic circumstances, or had ambitions of adventure beyond their social status.72 These others were the Marranos, that is, New Christians who chose neither to return elsewhere to Jewish community life, whether in secret enclaves within Spanish lands or in open performance of their ancestral religion in Ottoman or European lands, or to seek or risk assimilation into ecclesiastically monitored towns and cities. In brief, since the morada was not a church and the worship performed was not legitimated by priestly officers, the actions of the Penitentes was deliberately antinomian or heretical, although for most of the brothers — and most of the time — they thought, felt, and believed themselves to be good Catholics. 8.

It is through the enactment which is also an embodiment of the Passion, hence more than an imitatio Christi in aesthetic or memorial terms, that the Hermandad bonds itself into the body of Christ, an equivalent of, a substitution for, or an enhancing improvement on the kind of religious services available through the friars, were they to bother to deal with these outcast others, these living dead, the ghosts and demons who inhabit the wilderness. In this regard, sangres.com states quite explicitly — though with no proof at all — “one of Los Hermanos lives out the full Passion Play and is actually crucified, legitimating the confraternity’s devotions and demonstrating their own piety.” ‘Or again, in a different place, this anonymous author claims, “When Los Hermanos come together to celebrate rituals, they create the very sacraments. When they sing, they are singing for members of the brotherhood to feed their souls and their bodies in a veritable communion through the sharing of food” and this way, he or she continues, “they have continued to develop a very deep spiritual and mystical sense of community.”

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Timmons, “Espejo-Beltran Expedition,” writes that “Antonio de Espejo, a wealthy fugitive from justice accused of murder, who had taken refuge on the frontier and was looking for an opportunity to exonerate himself . . . offered his services to Fray Beltrán and agreed to join an expedition to rescue the two [supposedly missing: later found to be killed by the Pueblo] friars and to pay all expenses.” Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint, “Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado and Augustin Rodriguez” New Mexico Office of the State Historian online at http://www. newmexicohistory.org/filedetails.php?fileID=468. Flint and Flint write, for example, “It has often been assumed that Sanchez Chamuscado and Rodriguez heard about the Pueblo world of New Mexico as a result of unauthorized propsecting and slave raiding expeditions, such as were common at the time.”

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9.

These songs are contrafactions and encantadas, songs in other modalities or distorted melodies, whose traditional and familiar-sounding words create bridges and tunnels between known and unknown schemes of knoweldge, remembered and forgotten souvenirs of present and past suffering, celebrated and despised aspects of the individual self and the group identity.

The last point to be made in this summing up and commentary is that for all intents and purposes, whatever may have transpired after the second entrada following the Pueblo Rebellion, the foundational experiences and impressions left lasting effects on the land and the people who settled there, that is, the men and women who centred their communal and spiritual lives around the brotherhood of the Penitentes. In mythic terms, the territories north of the Rio Grande were filled with dangers, demons, and despair. Physically, it was, as Simmons puts it, “the poor, isolated cold, and unlovely kingdom of New Mexico.”73 Yet precisely because it could not sustain any agricultural or mining enterprises and held little or no interest to the kings in Spain or the viceroys in Mexico City — and also, one may add, the inquisitors of the Holy Office — it could serve other psychological, social and spiritual purposes, as we shall discuss in the rest of this chapter and book. Thus when Simmons claims, “When the colonists became convinced that no wealth was forthcoming, they escaped at the first opportunity. And the friars defected because Oñate’s brutal rule made conversion of the Pueblos unfeasible,” adding the rider, “or so they claimed,”74 he demonstrates the limitations of conventional historiography and its dependence on archival resources and archaeological evidence. What we shall say will be based, not on such official writings or on what can be cautiously read from a few ruins and remains, but rather on interpretations of other sources — oral testimony of descendants, contextual artistic and philosophical modes of expression and action, and deeper analysis of the premises upon which establishment historians draw their conclusions. It will then be possible to re-read and re-evaluate the same documents used by Marc Simmons and his ilk. We are looking, as I have stated several times already, for how two peoples — Marranos and the Christian settlers who formed the Penitentes — for their own reasons and in their own ways sought to hide themselves from the outside world, dissimulate and disguise their innovative religious performances, and prepare to move from the world of darkness into the light of sanctification and salvation.

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Simmons, The Last Conquistador, p. 168. Ibid, p. 168.

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GHOSTS, DEMONS AND MARRANOS It has been said that by 1550 there were more Spanish crypto-Jews than Spanish Catholics in Mexico City.75 On April 11, 1649, Tomas Trevino de Sobremonte was burned at the stake in Mexico City, a victim of the Inquisition. His crime: practicing the rites and ceremonies of the “dead law of Moses.”76 . . . it has been a continuous family tradition to live at the border, a visible strategic practice of Crypto Judaic families since about the XVI and XVII centuries.77 Almost every town in coastal Oaxaca has its encanto, a physical space where a fissure leads to an unknown, metaphysical world.78

In this dark and cold northern region where the lost and confused souls went — or were abandoned, inadvertently left behind by their parents or the tides of history — the Marranos felt in some deep and almost unconscious way that they were among the living dead, the ghosts of those ancestors who had lost their way in the world, forgotten their true identities, locked out from civil and ecclesiastical society, and invaded by alien forces, memories, and fears. Ancient Hebrews and the earliest rabbis thought of the world outside of Israel as polluted by corpse-uncleanness, and when they tried to imagine their own exile, galut, whether forced on them by invading powers or self-imposed by the disgust with compromise, assimilationism and betrayal of the ancestral Law, in terms that would make sense: they would see themselves as the Children of Israel rescued from Egypt by Moses, or by the mighty hand of the Unseen God, whose traces were only vaguely seen in pillars of cloud and fire.

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Wayne Hoffman, “The Jewish Traveler: Mexico City” Hadassah Magazine 84:5 (January 2003) online at http://www.hadassah.org/news/content/per_hadassah/2003/03_JAN/ traveler (seen 23/06/05). Chapter 66, “Burned at the Stake” The American Jewish Historical Society online at http:// www.ajhs. org/publications/chapters/chapter.cfm?documentID=256. Also available as “Tomas Trevino de Sobremonte (1592–1649)” at the Jewish Virtual Library online at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biograpjhy/Sobremonte. Evarardo Treviño Garza, “The Search for Family Origins”, as delivered at the December 1996 Conference of the Society for Cryto-Jewish Studies in Albuquerque, trans. from Spanish online at http://www.cryptojews.com/Garza. Alicia María González, The Edge of Enchantment: Sovereignty and Ceremony in Huatulco, Mexico, photographs by Roberto Ysáis (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institute) cited in a book notice from the Introduction at http://www. fulcrum-books.com/html/edge_of_enchantment (seen 16/10/2003).

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Dell F. Sanchez lists some of the “demonic issues”79 that attended the loss of Jewish identity by the men and women of Sephardic background who made their perilous way across the Atlantic to Mexico and then went beyond that to the wild nueva terra in the far, unexplored north. Each searched for his own encanto — a place of enchantment, to be sure, but also a song of enchantment, a spell-binding reminiscence in music — an opening into the metaphysical world of ritual purification through acts of penitential violence. These themes are, of course, familiar in the history of Israel but are both repeated and intensified in the specific focus on Mexico, and even more so in the examination of New Mexico. 11. Wandering 12. Persecution 13. Torture 14. Torment 15. Hate 16. Prejudice 17. Isolation 18. Persecution 19. Misery 10. Religious Control 11. Slavery 12. Shame 13. Superstition What is most remarkable about the list and about the people who suffered these traditional Jewish woes is that they were undertaken voluntarily, since many of Oñate’s and Carvajal’s settlers had already escaped from the Lands of Idolatry in Iberia or elsewhere in the Spanish and Portuguese empires or even at times been brought up and educated in rabbinical communities, with synagogues, schools, and all the social and legal institutions mandated by the Law. We can see this list amplified by specific historical people and events in Nueva España, as well as in Brazil and Spanish South America. For instance, Eva Alexandra Uchmany puts the point across forcefully, but in a way that calls out for correction, modification and re-interpretation. Here is what Uchmany says, first, with the proper names deleted so we can focus on the themes, and second, with numerals inserted in square brackets to facilitate the discussion: 79

Dell F. Sanchez, “The Repercussions of Losing the Sephardic Identity: Demonic Issues,” Mexican Heritage from Mexico, Alivah!!!. Issues for deliverance as presented in the Toxic Waste from Family Line series by Dr/Paul Cox, Asian’s Place online at http://www/ sephardimhope.org/RepercussionofLostSephardicIdentity (Seen 21 September 2004). Sanchez’s list repeats many themes in the title but puts them in varying clusters.

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Indeed, [1] crypto Jews developed the ability to walk in and out between Christian and Jewish society, [2] because they knew how to behave properly in the synagogue as well as in the church. The ability, [3] born in them, as a consequence of religious coercion, permitted some of them to leave behind for a while [4] the miserable social and economic situation in the ghettos and to search for better opportunities . . . Clearly, [5] many crypto-Jews lost the ability to put down roots anywhere and wandered from one place to another . . . [6] Travelers . . . infused new life into the small crypto Jewish communities and [7] kept them in constant communication with the intellectual centers of Judaism. Occasionally [8] these men . . . became the spiritual guides for some groups of their co-religionists. Moreover, [9] all these Jews carried books printed in Ferrara, Venice, or in some other cultural centers, [10] which found their way to the most remote corners of the Spanish Empire.80

[1] Though she concentrates on Crypto-Jews (not using the hyphen, something that modifies the formality of the identification into a looser category), Uchmany seems rather talking about what we call Fuzzy Jews, and especially the least formalized set within the group, the Marranos. The “ability to walk in and out”, however, is more problematical than she suggests, since it is neither always conscious nor consistent in the life of an individual or the overlapping of family history. [2] The notion that these Marranos “knew” what they were doing requires greater subtlety because we need to avoid the implication that all of the people involved could sustain the required self-control or carry through with the necessary subterfuges. [3] I do not think we can accept any genetic continuity in Jewishness that embraces intellectual or cultural knowledge, as though there were an encodable “essence” of belief and practice; rather, we can discuss the consequences of environmental conditioning, particularly child-rearing practices at both affective and cognitive levels, and preferences for specific stimuli of infants and young children at stages when such hormonal events inhibit or facilitate neuronal mapping of the brain. As we have indicated in my Masks in the Mirror, it is by such psychohistorical occurrences, unconscious for the most part but at the same time inside the historical boundaries of evolutionary choice, that expression of genes forms certain types of personality over others, e.g., cautious over precipitous, analytical rather than poetic, etc. [4] It may be questionable to speak of all ghettos as similarly or consistently “miserable”, as we know that at times, in cities such as Ferrara, there were no ghettos imposed, as in Venice, and different types of Jewish communities 80

Eva Alexandra Uchmany, “Presence of People from Jewish Origin and their Activities in New Spain,” Lecture given at Brown University on Monday, June 16, 1997, published in Reunir Vol. 111 (January 1998) and reprinted in Saudades online at http://www.saudades. org/joriginspain (Seen 23 June 2005).

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developed in the Sephardic Diaspora. For a ghetto, despite its bad name in later history, can be an encanta, a reconstituted and redefined place of national penitence: a protective armoury of explosive memories. [5] This is a key point that will be developed later in this book. There are two main ways in which Marranos could remain in contact with their Jewish roots: they could either move in and out of legal rabbinic communities or be contacted from time to time by formally certified representatives of synagogues and yeshivot or receive irregular visits from knowledgeable Jews on commercial or government business. In regard to the Marranos on the Moradas, unfortunately, neither form of contact seems to have occurred after settlement of the new colony. [6] As mentioned in the previous point, such travellers might be sent specifically by established Jewish communities in the Diaspora to maintain contacts and keep open lines of communication, occasionally, as well, to arrange marriages, adjudicate disputes over heritage, and keep commercial enterprises functioning across state, confessional and other boundaries. They might also be sporadic, almost random encounters, with whole generations skipped between such contacts and renewing of family or communal ties. Most rarely, however, would these meetings “infuse new life” into whole communities, but instead might raise the curiosity of a few individuals within a family to find out more through conversations, access to books, or move altogether back to Jewish life elsewhere in the world. [7] Constancy is the issue in question here. I suggest that the preponderance of evidence suggests sporadic, random and rare as better terms to modify such contact — and knowledge. In particular, in Nueva México there would be very long periods between any direct contacts, perhaps four to five generations, and then mostly, if at all, they would be more indirect. [8] Uchmany may be correct in her claim that “all these men” can be considered “spiritual guides” if she is discussing the main commercial centres in Mexico, Brazil, Peru and elsewhere in the Spanish Empire where some modified form of Jewish community life, however much it was officially “crypto”, but in the outlying districts, beyond the reaches of both state and church, and where “normal” economics could not function, the “spiritual guides” were either ghosts or demons. Here I take the word ghosts to refer to the souvenirs of the ancestral faith (“the Dead law of Moses,” as the Inquisitors termed it) and also repeated actions, preferential tastes in food, appellations given to children, and peculiarities in prayer, such as the singular Dio rather than the normal Spanish Dios, signalling the opposition between monothesism and Trinitarian dogma. Demon is taken in its ancient Greek sense of daimon, glossed by Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, as the spirit who mediates, communicates and comes to live in the spaces “between” ordinary profane experience and the goal of philosophical desire, 73

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the realm of pure ideas, where the good, the true, and the beautiful exist. In Jewish terms, such daimons are almost like angels, malachim, the embodied voice of God, the divine intelligence that mediates between humans and their Creator. [9] Uchmany has evidence that some actual printed books from Italian and Dutch presses made their way to Mexico and into the hands of secret Jewish families, but, given the strictness of the Inquisition’s censorship of cargo from heretical lands, it is more likely that most of these “books” were carried in the heads of migrants and visitors, as Mr Kien carried his library in his head in Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fe. [10] This is the crucial issue: did there, could there have been any of such books, whether printed or mental, brought to the isolated communities of the Brotherhood of the Penitentes during period of their formation, their development, or their more recent decline? How could they know or remember or dare to act like Jews, men, women, children?

MARRANISM AS A WAY OF DOUBT ¡Ay de mí! que perdí (sin arrogancia) la ciencia más segura y verdadera, lunque algunos la den por ignorancia Woe is me, for I lost (without arrogance) the most certain of knowledge and the truest, though some there are who account it ignorance. — Antonio Enríquez Gómez, Cuando contemplo mi passada gloria81

In regard to this last point, one of the characteristics of Crypto-Judaism and Marranism is that traditional, normative roles for men in Jewish life, public and private, are no longer possible; study of the sacred texts and intellectual debate in the synagogue disappear almost entirely because there are neither synagogues, holy books, nor rabbis; and most home-based activities in which a father or other male takes a leading role also are severely attenuated at best, leaving the mother’s and daughters’ activities — especially food preparation, 81

Antonio Enríquez Gómez, “When I Consider that Glorious Past of Mine,” lines 55–57, in Timothy Oelman, ed. and trans., Marrano Poets of the Seventeenth Century: An Anthology of the Poetry of João Pinto Delgado, Antonio Enríquez Gómez, and Miguel de Barrios (Rutherford, Madison and Taneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1982) pp. 142–143.

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hygiene, and education — to serve as the central markers of Judaic existence.82 However, with males either playing a very subordinate or no role at all in domestic Judaism, two other things happen. On the one hand, women’s activities expand and develop to cover areas of a more specifically religious nature; what were once fairly vague and marginal involvements with kabbalistic healing arts, dream-interpretation, and festive celebrations, now become significant sites of intellectual, mystical, and spiritual life. On the other, part of the response to the second super-added feature of the kairotic trauma of Mexican Conquest experienced by all members of the emergent Hispanic society would be the shame and rage in New Christian men who have lost their dominant position in public and private expressions of Judaism — or whatever remained in memory to be set against the new conditions of the Marrano home and social life — and a compensatory need to assert themselves as more macho and more willing to participate in bloody rituals, such as flagellation and self-crucifixion. Whatever the rational and unconscious function of such bloody rites may have been for Old Christians or recently converted indigenous peoples (where it would also be mixed in with their own traditional beliefs concerning the spiritual value of violence and self-mortification), for those with a Judaic past the ceremonies would act also as outlets for rage — either as punishment of the shameful, tainted Christ-killing identity that forever inheres in the tainted blood of the Jewish converso or as anger at the persecuting Catholic self that denies the Secret-Jew-within the opportunity to be at peace with its own ancestral identity. As Thomas J. Steele points out, too, this transformation of history, character, personality and collective memory in the somewhat later period of the movement northwards from Old Mexico (New Spain) into New Mexico was not a matter of a Hegelian dialect, with thesis (Franciscan penitential devotion) versus antithesis (Pueblo traditional inducements of ecstatic states through self-mutilation) yielding a new third synthesized entity, the Penitentes.83 Like the Aztec survivors of the conquest, along with other Indian nations included in the new European kingdom, the Pueblo Indians themselves adapted the new Christian themes and images, as well as blood rituals of the Eucharist and public celebration of the Easter Passion, to their own traditional beliefs and practices. For example, Michael K. Ward points out that the figure of Christ preached by the Franciscan friars was recreated as a “new warlord, Christ, before whom even mighty kings humbled themselves 82

83

Much of this paragraph depends on a longer argument presented in Norman Simms, “Marranism Reconsidered as Duplicity, Creativity, and Lost Innocence,” RuBriCa 13 (2004) 67–117. Thomas J. Steele, “Cofradia: The Penitentes of New Mexico” Culture:worldandi.com online at file://A:CofradiaThePenitentesof New-CultureMexico

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and offered gifts.”84 What Ward calls “passive resistance” by the Indians could be taken in a more aggressive way as the expropriation of missionary stories in order to make them express Pueblo beliefs.” The Native Americans of the Southwest as well as much of Gran Chichimeca,” he writes, “recognized [and this has to be understood in a powerfully intrusive and transgressive sense] that Jesus’ ‘warriors possessed lightening (gunpowder) and monsters (horses) ready to kill those who did not submit to Christ as their new lord.’”85 Indeed, Ramón Guttiérez argues that “‘[t]he liturgy of Christ’s crucifixion became an intense rhetorical contest’ between Spanish priests and Native American medicine people.”86 On the one hand, it is asserted that “Franciscan . . . [priests] proselytized like ‘madmen . . . [and] flogged their bodies to a crimson pulp, and dragged enormous crosses through the streets’ to demonstrate their ‘immense sanctity and superior magical powers’.”87 They would assume chiefly poses and dress. On the other hand, the Indian shamans and other specialists in the powers of the sacred traditions, not only mocked the Spaniards — “You Christians are crazy; you desire and pretend that this pueblo shall also be crazy,” said medicine man Chililí in 1630 — but protested against desecration of their customs by friars who allowed bloodletting among non-chiefs and blamed illness and bad hunting on lapses in their people’s faithfulness to the old ways. During the twelve years that followed the uprising in 1680 when the local chiefs and shamans were back in control of the region, “[t]heir rule may have been more palatable to the oppressed Pueblos, but the new Indian authorities were no less autocratic than their Spanish equivalents.”88 According to Jane C. Sanchez, writing further on “Spanish-Indian Relations in the Seventeenth Century,” They demanded strict obedience, heavy tributes, and time-consuming religious ceremony. Moreover, witnesses reported that they often exacted the death penalty . . . 89

Thus, instead of the European-based community reshaping the indigenous culture to the point of near disappearance, as is often assumed, Steele points out that “exactly the opposite” occurred, with “the recalcitrance of the Pueblos to accept” the beliefs and practices of the Spaniards and Spanish-trained 84 85 86 87 88

89

Ward, “The Pueblo Region”, op. cit. Ibid. Cited in Ward, “The Pueblo Region”, op. cit. Ward, “The Pueblo Religion”, op. cit. Jane C. Sanchez, “Spanish-Indian Relations in the Seventeenth Century: The Causes and Results of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680: A Paper Presented before the Albuquerque Westerners’ Corral, October 21, 1999 online (2000) at http://home.sprintmail.com/ ~sanchezj/westrnrs. Sanchez, “Spanish-Indian Relations” op. cit.

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missionaries with their military support resulting in a redefinition of that supposedly hegemonic civilization into what came to be known as Hispanic culture. Even that view, however, is too mechanical to match the facts on the ground. For as Robert N. Batson points out, “The Catholic priests who came to New Mexico in the 1600s to Christianize the Indians arrived with little more than their faith and personal memories of the churches of México.”90 Three additional points about these clerics who came in the first waves of settlement to the New World: (1) they came also with baggage of prejudice, bigotry and persecutions that had been rife especially among the lower orders of the Church during the past two centuries and were most responsible for the pogroms against the Jews; (2) they included in their midst an unknown number of conversos, some of whom may have been still more than a little sympathetic to their family’s past faith and therefore able to act as conduits for support and knowledge to any judaizers they came into contact with; and (3), whatever the merit in the first two points on a strictly historical basis, they came in insufficient numbers to apply pressure in any coherent and consistent manner, and were therefore unable to withstand themselves the temptation, as it were, to conform to local folkways of the native Indians, to the forming new culture of the mixed race Mexicans, and to the secret Jewish families and communities seeking refuge in this corner of the New World. For everyone involved in the enterprise of conquest, colonization and settlement the shock of the new was evident, the clash of civilizations, and the rupture and re-establishment of cultural and individual mental equilibrium: everyone meaning here the invading conquistadors and their clerical assistants, the indigenous peoples on the ground through which the conquistadores marched, and the hidden groups of New Christians in their midst. It was their speech, that is, in the inner and outer discourses of their minds as shaped by previous upbringing, education and other forms of ecclesiastical indoctrination broken apart by the traumatic journey across the sea from Europe — or for the native peoples themselves,91 who were also invaded by 90

91

Robert N. Batson, “The Architecture of San José de Gracia”, Tradicion Revista 1:4 (1996) and now since 2002 online at file://A:TheArchitectureofSanJosedeGraciaFeatureArticle. I am developing this idea from an essay by Shaul Magid, “The Brokenness (and Sacrality) of the Human Voice: A Response to Aryeh Cohen” The Journal of Textual Reasoning 1:1 (2002) on-line at http://etext. lib.virginia.edu/journals/tr/volume1/shaulTR1. While S. Magid’s argument is concerned with a debate over the relationship of oral and written authority in Judaism, I am abstracting some of the ideas about the importance of the living spoken voice — in this case it would be the dynamic of the Pueblo Indian civilization — and its confrontation with written texts — in this case the practices, beliefs, and memories of the Spaniards attempting to Christianize the Indians and exert suzerainty over their territory. My point is that the missionaries and the soldiers were usually too few to dominate in a sustained way and, while allowing for recreation occurring on the Pueblo side, of course, were effectively shifted into the posture of

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alien images, concepts, and feelings, and the culture that was created in the spaces opened by the Spanish incursions into what would become known as New Mexico — all this an ordeal of confusion and discombobulation. Above all, after the first flush of conquest of the civilized south, the strange entry into the lands to the north, strange for the Europeans and for the Mexicans shaped by the generation of the earlier conquest and recreation of something new and uncanny — into a territory that was only nominally dominated by Catholic customs, especially when one moves beyond a few temporary and uncertain urban-ecclesiastical centres and at least until the mid-nineteenth century when the region came under United States governance, with foreign (mostly French and Italian) priests, Protestant pioneers, and secular federal and territorial officials. In addition to the Gauchapines, the Iberian-born elite in the church and the military,92 from which on occasion there were rebels or renegades, whether or not New Christians who had covered their tracks through inter-marriage, purchases of certificates of purity of blood, and enrolment in prestigious military orders; there were pure-blooded Indians who fought back many times before they were finally conquered by the invading Spanish troops, there were the socalled genizaros, a mix of mestizos and ex-slaves of African or Indian descent, marginalized by the rest of society. Linda Cordell and Matthew Schmader describe their role in colonial society: Genizaros served as military personnel, protecting colonists and Pueblo Indians from attacks by nomadic Indians, who had, by this time, acquired the horse and were thus a real threat. Some Genizaros were captive “barbarous Indians,” some were Pueblo Indians, and some were low-class mestizos.93

Del Hayo cites early witnesses who spoke of the “scum” and “social trash” who tended to gather in the fringes of the northern frontier: . . . and these were the “vagabonds,” the adventurers tormented with nomadic concerns, the desperate debtors, “stowaways” (who were the ones who had entered the Indies illegally; they were later called “gachupines,” the strangers, “not arranged with His Majesty to live in these countries,” the recalcitrant bachelors (conquerors of Indian and Negro women) and the married ones who had left their wives in Spain, all of the[m] condemned to immediate deportation; those who feared the

92 93

a counter-hegemonic group reacting off rather than acting on the peoples they came to colonize. In this essay, the brotherhood of the Penitentes represents not a single entity that articulates the changes occurring in New Mexico and Colorado from the 1540s to the 1940s (to choose somewhat arbitrary dates) but an institution which had and still has many forms each of which reflects (refracts) the complex dynamics of the historical events we are tracing out. Cordel and Schmader, “Heritage and Human Environment,” op cit. Ibid.

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inquisitorial arm: heretics, Lutherans, Jews, warlocks and enchanters; but also the fugitive criminals from the jails or deserters of pending processes.94

In addition, Stanley D. Chapman writes of this group as outcasts from the Catholic Church, and he thus brings them close to what we have to consider as the anomalous, ambiguous and subversive (cess)pool of people we are studying:95 The genizaros spoke a different form of Spanish, married within their group and lived together communally. The vast majority of them were members of the Pious Confraternity of Our Lord Jesus Nazarene, an example of the amalgamation and integration of Catholicism and native beliefs as displayed in their acts of piety: acts of mortification, flagellation, cross-bearing and the Good Friday Crucifixion of a member.96

On the one hand, as Chapman points out, there is much in this description that can be traced to the Franciscans who began their project of christianization of the native population in 1598, but on the other, as we will try to demonstrate — in regard at least a small section of the members of the brotherhood — what is said of genizaros can be matched by what is normally ascribed to the Marranos of the region themselves, from a distinct form of spoken Spanish through closeintermarriages to a sense of isolation and alienation from the rest of society. This matter of “the lost people”97 will be taken up shortly in the section dealing with a further speculation. Meanwhile, it may also be that what Chapman and others, including Marrano descendants themselves, assign to the late sixteenth century belongs more to the third-wave of Franciscan missionizing in the period 1830–1850, just prior to the absorption of the region into the United States. Yet the seeds of the Penitentes are sowed in the other two attempts to convert the native populations: first, when the Spaniards made their initial push into what would become New Mexico, and second, after their overzealousness led to a Pueblo Revolt in 1680 and a twelve year interlude when the indigenous religions regained the ascendancy, albeit with two differences: (a) as in all nativist revivals, the return to pre-Christian practices and beliefs was consciously imbued with anti-Catholic 94 95

96

97

Del Hayo, History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 52. Similar collections of outcasts, runaways and eccentrics can be found in American history among the so-called Melungeons of the southern states and in Mohawk villages around what is now Oneonta, New York, where General Clinton was sent to scatter the runaway black slaves, outlaws, social degenerates and other degradados (as the Portuguese would call such people) who had been welcomed into these highly productive communities at the end of the eighteenth century. Stanley D. Chapman, “The Penitente Brotherhood” in Raphael Bicentanary 1787–1987; extract available online at http://www/lizeray.com/ortigins_of_the_raphael_family. Del Hayo, History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 52.

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feelings and vigorous practices; and (b), related to that, transformed residual Franciscan rites and prayers could not be kept out, especially when no longer recognized as foreign. Each intrusion by Spanish priests and friars was followed by a defeat or a retreat, and both the ebb and the flow further transformed the religious life of the people involved, with the so-called voids left after the departure of formal Church activities filled by the founding, re-founding and further reconstitution of the Penitentes cult. While the presence of Franciscan friars during that first flagellation at the end of the sixteenth century strengthens the case for this as one of the causative agents in the spread of the Penitentes throughout what is now the south-western United States, a third anthropological and social influence is suggested,98 one that brings the story back to the classical sources first adduced by Lummis. At the best of times in the pre-Anglo period, as it is sometimes called, Spanish ecclesiastics did not reach into every village, hamlet or smaller settlement.99 While historians such as Enrique R. Lamadrid see this as a sign of neglect by the Church, or others call a painful forgetting by those into whose charge the pastoral care of the recent converts was placed,100 it is also a consequence of deliberate attempts by some of the Hispano peoples not to be under the control of the Church and to be away from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, as well as to maintain a life honed on secrecy in Spain and Portugal, and later in Mexico, since the early years of the fifteenth century.101 98

99

100

101

I hesitate to use the terms “primitive and folk peoples” for the Hispanic communities and Pueblo Indians, as in Thomas J. Steele, “Cofradia: The Penitentes of New Mexico”, world-andi.com (August 1986) online at file://A:CopfradiaThePenitentesoofNewMexicoCulture. Speaking of the time of the Carvajals, del Hayo concludes: “Regarding the evangelization of the natives, we believe that it did not exist in the period we study” (History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 54). The Holy Office used this as one of the charges against Luis the Elder, indicating in this way that, unlike most conquistadors, the secret Jews did not put a high priority on this missionary goal. The high proportion of Sephardim in the region may be as much as the cause and the consequence of such foundational “lapses” on the part of the original leaders. The Inquisitors were certainly worried about “the depraved heresy” rampant in these fringe areas (Del Hayo, History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 57). Enrique R. Lamadrid, “Nuevo Mexicanos of the Upper Rio Grande: Culture, History, and Society” online at file://A:HispanoMusicand CultureofNorthernRioGrande. On the workings of the Inquisition in Mexico, see Solange Alberro, “El Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en Nueva España: algunas modalidades de su actividad,” CHELA 4 (1989) 9–29. There are, however, apologists for the institution of the Holy Office both in Europe and in the New World; they tend to see the Inquisition as no worse, and sometimes more just than equivalent religious institutions in Protestant lands, blame the bad press on the Black Legend of Spain, and also quibble to mitigate the extent of those arrested and the goods confiscated, those tortured, and those killed in autos-de-fé; and they tend to congratulate the officers of the Inquisition for keeping both Spain and Portugal, as well as the New World free of religious wars for more than four hundred years. See for instance

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But the story does not end there, and in fact the history has to be parsed by more careful chronological pointers. Several times, for instance, the Franciscans came into New Mexico and southern Colorado. They came with Luis de Carvajal and what seems to have been a substantial number of Marranos among the military forces, government agents, and ecclesiastical officials, including the Franciscans.102 In a collection of Marrano testimonies collected by Gloria Golden,103 Woodrow Eugene Longoria speaks at some length on the CryptoJews who accompanied Carvajal and tried to establish secret communities in those areas now known as Hispanic. Conflating a great deal of historical detail, and providing us with a perspective from the memories of the victims and survivors of the Holy Office, Longoria says: The Inquisition was established in Mexico, but it wasn’t very active at the time. People were practicing Judaism, and they became a little too careless, too open. They were becoming an embarrassment. The Inquisition then became more active, and they even imprisoned Governor Carvajal and his nephew who had the same name. His nephew was very outspoken about it, and the whole immediate family eventually died at the hands of the Inquisition.104

It is to be assumed that “people” is a term for the sizable minority of New Christians who came to Mexico. Then the modern informant explains his own family’s involvement in these formative historical events: “The second

102

103

104

Lee Penyak, “Mas que sólo la destrucción de la Leyenda Negra: Un vistazo a los estudios actuales sobre la Inquisición española” CHELA 4 (1989) 77–88. Not all of these apologists it seems are Catholic. Most Jewish scholars regard the institution as totally pernicious, although Benzion Netanyahu grants legitimacy to its work in rooting out heretics among New Christians. For a list of the first converso settlers who came along with Luis de Carvajal el Viejo, see Del Hayo, History of El Nuevo Reino, pp. 58–59. The historian adds: “there surely were non-Jewish Portuguese in la Nueva España, but they must have been extremely rare and it is because of this that we register all persons as Sephardims [sic!] which are said to be Portuguese or of Portuguese descent” (Del Hayo, History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 58). Gloria Golden, ed., Remnants of Crypto-Jews among Hispanic Americans, with the assistance of Andrea Alessandra Cabello and Sohaib Raihan (Mountain View, CA: Floricanto Press, 2005). Cited as Remnants hereafter. Longoria also has his own threepage confession on why he has converted to Judaism (online at file://A:FrankLongoria) and gives his Hebrew name as Joseph Ben Abraham. This essay supplies some details of family history not found in the Golden citation. He also makes an interesting general statement: “It is important to point out that nobody knows for sure how many of the settlers of northern Mexico were Conversos or were old Christians who intermarried with Conversos in Mexico. Also, to the best of my knowledge, not all Conversos relapsed into Judaism. All descendants of Jews were Conversos, but not all Conversos were crypto-Jews or Marranos. Some of the Conversos were crypto-Jews as attested by the records of the Mexican Inquisition and the synagogues that existed in Mexico during colonial times.” Golden, Remnants, p. 191.

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in command to Carvajal might be one of my ancestors. His last name was Sosa.105 I don’t know, but I suspect it. I’m working on this research.” After this hesitant remark, Longoria, who claims that he feels “a strong connection to Judaism” — that “It’s my soul that’s connected to Judaism,” if not a tangible, historical datum — returns to the account of Mexican Marranos in the sixteenth century: The original Carvajal was imprisoned. They [the inquisitors] let him go. They came back and imprisoned him again. They took him back to Mexico City. All the cities that he established are in northeastern Mexico, and all my ancestors came from that area. I’ve traced them back to the late 1600s . . . Governor Carvajal was imprisoned the second time. Before he [the agent of the Holy Office] did that, [the Governor] put this man [Longoria’s ancestor], the second in command, in charge of taking care of the people [the Crypto-Jews trying to flee to the north]. When Sosa realized that Carvajal was not going to be coming back, he gathered up as many of the [Marrano] families as he could into a group and decided to escape before they’d [agents of the Inquisition] come and get the rest of them.106

At this point, Longoria challenges received historical opinion to defend his ancestor, and moreover to assert the integrity of the Crypto-Jews who fled into the region north of the Rio Grande. The official story in most of the history books is that Sosa was arrogant and decided to go and explore New Mexico without permission from the Spanish government. This is the other theory. He gathered the people together and brought them up to New Mexico to escape. All the families with these [New Christian names, such as Torres, Salinas, Sosa, and González] came to New Mexico. It was the first time any Spaniards had come up to New Mexico. When the people from the Inquisition realized they had come up here, as far as Española, they sent soldiers to get them They were brought back to Mexico City. I don’t believe all of them came up here in the first place. I think some of them stayed up here and didn’t go back to Mexico City.107

In a sense, this is the crux of the issue on whether or not there were really a significant number of Crypto-Jews who used the existing — and changing — institution of the Penitentes to give some order to their attempts to remain faithful to the historical identity as Jews. Not only did Sosa, acting on behalf of Governor Carvajal, lead a component of these New Christians into 105

106 107

Del Hayo speaks of Gaspar de Sosa. He cites Luis de Carvajal el Mozo as identifying him as a Portuguese and a judaizer: “I know he is a Jew and keeps and believes the said law” (History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 46; also see p. 72). Golden, Remnants, p. 191. Ibid, pp. 191–192.

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what is now New Mexico, there were also a number who would follow in the years after the Inquisitorial arrests which brought many back to Mexico City for trial and often punishment and others who were in the first wave of escape and managed to elude arrest and transference back south. Evidence in the historical records on these three events is almost impossible to find, except in oral testimonies such as those we are an analyzing here and in statements in the archival documents and early histories whose specific language and conceptual categories have to be read au rebours, against the grain, that is, treating them as hostile witnesses whose accounts of historical events need to be challenged and re-interpreted in the light of subsequent events (such as the survival of Crypto-Jewish families, customs, and beliefs in no matter how attenuated and fragmentary form). This what makes Longoria’s claims so vital to our investigation: not that they themselves can be taken at face value or as adequate to challenge standard “official” views, but as indicators of a counter-historical discourse that causes us to examine other seemingly trivial or casual remarks in those archival documents from ecclesiastical and governmental sources. Here is more of Longoria’s testimony to Gloria Golden, and it is important that we see the juxtaposition between his attempt at historical outline and his private family memories. Of the original Crypto-Jews who travelled with Sosa but did not return to Mexico City, he says: They could have hidden in the mountains. They got away before they [soldiers sent by the government on behalf of the Inquisition] came and got them. It would have been easy for them to wander off on their own before these people from Mexico City came for them. I think before they got to Mexico City some of them might have escaped also.108

What is not stated here, although implied, is that the Marranos who escaped into the mountains could only have survived if they were able to make contact with local Pueblo Indians and reach some sort of accord with them to live as peacefully as possible, with the Europeans developing trade and commercial opportunities in the region. What is not clear, of course, is how these Marranos, who seem to have intermarried with the Indians — hence the very mixed pedigrees of the informants in Gloria Golden’s collection of interviews — were involved in the subsequent relations between the Pueblo nations and the Spanish colonial regime, especially during and after the crucial twelve years of Indian rule after the rebellion of 1680 and the Reconquest in 1692. The formal records speak of “apostates”109 and this is usually understood to refer to Indians who cast off their imposed Christian identities and reverted to their ancestral 108 109

Golden, Remnants, p. 193. Sanchez, “Spanish-Indian Relations,” op. cit.

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religions, but it may also be a term that includes the Marranos who used the opportunity of relief from Franciscan rule and inquisitorial persecution to develop their own kind of judaizing faith and practices, perhaps under the guise of the Penitente brotherhood. It is clear up to the point of identifying individuals or families that, other than the relations between the various Pueblo Indians and the priests, friars, soldiers and government agents, there were also less formal encounters between these indigenous peoples and settlers coming up from Mexico. These encounters were often based on wishful thinking and misunderstanding on both sides, although it would seem that Spanish explorers and church officials had no real wish to understand the other side, except in seeking the location of riches and slaves. For instance, after reporting on a tense military confrontation in 1540 between Coronado and members of various Hopi clans, a traditional informant recorded by Frank Waters says: Nevertheless the Spaniards were escorted up to Oraibi, fed and quartered, and the agreement explained to them, it was understood that when the two were finally reconciled, each would correct the other’s laws and faults; they would live side by side and share in common all the riches of the land and their faiths in one religion that would establish the truth of life in a spirit of universal brotherhood. The Spaniards did not understand and, having found no gold, they soon parted. (My emphasis added.)110

By the early seventeenth century, following this abortive adventure led by Coronado, missionary activity had begun in earnest, albeit on a relatively small scale. According to Water’s informant, the Spanish and Mexican friars were neither particularly moral in their sexual relations with the Indians nor very much concerned for the welfare of the people, other than to exploit their labour in the construction of churches, forts, and other public buildings.111 Conversions seem to have often been forced and without adequate instruction, so that enmity between the two cultures was inevitable. Yet, if other evidence from modern descendants of New Christians who came along with the military and ecclesiastical invaders can be believed, then there were instances of cooperation outside of the official view; and this cooperation could include such matters as inter-marriage, protection of Marranos fleeing the Inquisition, and mutual aid in developing trade relations, as we know, from an earlier instance of extra-legal European journeying, occurred when Cabeza de Vaca was criss-crossing the region early in the previous century.

110 111

Waters, “Part Four: The Lost White Brother”, The Book of the Hopi, p. 309. Ibid, pp. 310ff.

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Pushed out by the Indian uprising in 1680, the friars left what Robert N. Batson calls “a void” filled as it was in many areas, by the Penitentes.112 When the territories fell to United States rule, again the Franciscan friars and the Spanish-Mexican priests left, and the spiritual neglect113 was — one can hardly say “filled” because an intense competition for the souls of those left behind took place between French Catholic priests, Protestant churches, and the Penitentes. Richard Valdéz reports that his family history goes back to groups from Andalusia who came to New Spain in the 1600s: “Mom’s name, Luján, in the old Ladino language meant luxury. Dad’s name, Valdéz, meant valley in Spain. They’re both Sephardic names” (Remnants, p.199). Then he reports some historical details preserved in family: Some of my family came with Don Diego de Vargas. A cousin said that when the family left Spain they were Judios (Jews).114 They were conversos during the Inquisition. The family was called Marranos because they didn’t observe kosher laws. The cousin said that Christianity was brought upon them, that they had to convert. They were forced. They later became devout Christians.115

It must be kept in mind that none of these terms are exactly synonymous; nor are they mutually exclusive; no more so than, in the light of historical reality, being a devout Christian prevents an individual or family from also being a Marrano or Crypto-Jew. While neither the Church nor the Synagogue would accept as legitimate this kind of mixing of faiths and practices, this is nevertheless exactly what these people have done in various ways for at least four hundred years. Richard Valdéz then goes to speak of his family’s connections with the Penitentes. “One of my grandfathers,” he says, “was a prayer leader (hermano) 112 113

114

115

Batson, “The Architecture of San José de Gracia”. Julian Samora and Patricia Vandel Simon, Chapter Twenty-One, “The Religious Dimension of Mexican-Americans,” A History of the Mexican-American People online at http://www.jsri.msu.edu/museum/pubs/MexAmHist/toc. Judios refers to practicing Jews who have either never converted or been forced to convert or who have returned unambiguously to Judaism. It may at times, for polemic purposes, be used as an alternative to judaizantes, Judaizers, that is, New Christians who in the eyes of the Church have beliefs or practices which are listed as Judaic whether or not the individuals and families themselves recognize them as such. Conversos are simply Jews or Moslems who became, voluntarily or under duress, Catholics; for political reasons in Spain and later in Portugal they were designated New Christians to distinguish them from Old Christians, individuals and families who had never — or never in living memory — been anything other than Catholics. Marrano is a far more complex and complicated term which has a strong pejorative connotation, used both by Christians and Jews to stigmatize New Christians whose motives in conversion are held suspect Golden, Remnants, p. 199.

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in the Penitentes” and while it is uncertain whether hermano, brother, can be taken as a leadership term — we sometimes hear that there were no leaders, no hierarchy at all, there are other occasions, probably in reference to the post-1850 reforms in the organization, that do mandate senior members — it is likely that older hermanos and those belonging to prestigious families in the community would indeed be considered as leaders of the brotherhood. Then we are told what the brotherhood was: “The main apostolic ministry of the Brotherhood of Penitentes was the corporate works of mercy, caring for the sick, visiting the sick, helping widows, and community things for the Brotherhood such as burial.”116 Again this is a rather cleaned up version and probably reflects one modern avatar of the group whose defining activity was rather to perform acts of selfinflicted bloody violence. However, be that as it may, what Valdéz has to see is remarkable for its candour (if that is what it is) in revealing the judaizing tendencies in at least this one local chapter of the Penitentes: At one time in New Mexico, the clergy disappeared so the Brotherhood acted as the ministry for what the clergy normally did. I believe the Penitentes were cryptoJews. In the moradas they have a menorah, a southwestern menorah. Penitentes pray in Ladino. They say kaddish, improvised from what Jews do. They light candles for the dead during services — Novenas for nine days. They believe that their souls will be delivered from the elements of purgatory. This organization came from Spain in Sevilla. They make noises called maracas. I believe that it originates from Judaism. They use chains, hammers, or anything to make noise. For every Hispanic man who belongs to a morada, the oldest son is initiated into the society so the society won’t die out.117

Once again we have a confused conflation of chronological times and events, but this is exactly what constitutes the power of the oral testimony as a vehicle for memories which run against the grain of official history. There were several times when the “clergy disappeared”, and each time there would seem to be a time when both old native customs would reassert themselves, albeit with mixed and nativist changes, and an opportunity for Marranos to relax from fear of persecution by the ecclesiastical authorities, though never a complete respite from community sanctions, whether by devout Christians of various stripes or by Indian religious leaders suspicious of unfamiliar judaizing practices To call all Penitentes Crypto-Jewish is a radical overstatement, but it does raise the question of whether several small groups of local moradas may not have developed as institutions to serve the private needs of Marrado families both by performing traditional Jewish mitzvoth, such as those enumerated in the 116 117

Golden, Remnants, p. 199. Ibid, p. 199.

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statement above, and by providing an outlet for virtually unconscious inner rage and guilt feelings to be expressed with relative impunity under the guise of Catholic penitential fervour and in a manner that adapted familiar shamanistic attitudes from the surrounding Pueblo cultures. Whether there actually were the reflexes of synagogue worship that Valdéz claims or these assertions are filtered through his own familiarity, nostalgia and wish-fulfilment dreams cannot be proved one way or another, although the “southwestern menorah” he speaks of as coextensive with the nine days candle-lighting of a novena suggests that whatever did remain has long since been absorbed into Christian pieties. Purgatory certainly is not a Jewish concept. Yet when the informant reports that “The chants in the morada are from the Old Testament. We sing The Song of Songs. I want this brought out,”118 his intensity must be seen as having equal weight to the easy dismissal of his statement by pointing out that Old Testament, even the Song of Songs, have been well-integrated into Catholic worship for nearly two thousand years. Julian Samora and Patricia Vandel Simon similarly describe the confraternity’s function as benign and use ameliorative terms: As a mutual aid society, Los Penitentes functioned as a civil and ecclesiastical organization and led the community in prayer, worship, and catechism, while at the same time they made sure that everyone had the basics for a decent quality of life. The members of the confraternity included an official rezador (prayer leader) and cantor (who led song and prayer at rosaries and wakes). They spiritually consoled and offered material aid for the dying and their families. This form of popular religion expressed the lifestyles, beliefs, and values that were interwoven with Mexican culture throughout the northern frontier and largely created a Catholic atmosphere that lacked the bearing of a religious clergy. Sensitive to the unique political, economic, and cultural dimensions out of which religion emerges, popular religion recognizes the presence of the divine in the world as it embraces the everyday life experiences and beliefs of a people. For this ethnic group, it reflected a rural and communal existence that we define as Mexican or Mexican American.

It should be obvious that this kind of bland politically-correct résumé is totally inadequate to the painful, humiliated and contradictory experiences of the people involved, and also glosses over the violent, bloody and guilt-ridden rituals at the heart of the cofradia in its various articulations in time and place.119 Samora and Simon also exclusively see the Penitentes as a phenomenon created by the Mexican American people, a distinct ethnic, if mestizos, community, 118 119

Golden, Remnants, p. 201. Cp. my study which examines medieval guilds in London from a psychohistorical point of view, Norman Simms, “Passion, Compotatio, Rixus and the Shameful Thing: English Guilds and the Corpus Christi Cycles” Mentalities/Mentalités 11:2 (1997) 45–60; and “Medieval Guilds, Passions and Abuse” Journal of Psychohistory 26:1 (1998) 478–513.

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rather than a social institution developed by diverse mixtures and groupings of people for various social and psychological needs.120 Still later, in 1821, at the time of the Mexican Revolution, when the Franciscans were forced to flee again and the Third Order was replaced by a society known either as “The Brotherhood of our Father Jesus Christ” or “The Brotherhood of the Blood of Christ,”121 and this new version of the secret brotherhood seems to be more violent and bloody than the other two, perhaps because influenced by local Indian traditions and secret societies of shamanic violence. Prince describes some of their more gruesome performances: All members were marked with a deeply cut cross on the back, made by a sharp piece of flint, and this wound was expected to be kept open during forty days. On each Ash Wednesday, all members were expected to reopen this cross and keep it open until Good Friday. It is during Holy Week, and particularly from Wednesday to Friday, that the special exercises take place, together with processions and representations of the crucifixion. The most usual penance is with a braided rope of yucca (soap weed) or of cactus, terminating with a knot or ball of cactus, with which they whip themselves, throwing the cord first over one naked shoulder and then over the other, in such a way that the thorny extremity strikes the same place in the middle of the back, which in a short time becomes a mass of gore; and the torment is almost insupportable.122

A major figure in the transformation of the brotherhood into an even more violent and bloody movement can be seen in the man who opposed the earlier avatar of the movement. Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814–1888),123 apostolic vicar of the Santa Fe diocese, represents the strongly anti-Spanish elements within the Catholic Church that came into power with the Americanization of the region in the middle of the nineteenth century.124 His main opponent in what Ronny Baier calls a Kulturkamf between the French-born and educated Bishop, promoting 120

121 122 123

124

On the nature of marginalized groups necessary for hegemonic society to define itself, see Norman Simms, “The Cagots of Southwestern France: A Study in Structural Discrimination,” Mentalities/Mentalités 8:1 (1993) 44–64. Prince, Spanish Mission Churches, p. 370. Ibid, pp. 370–371. For a good short biography of Lamy, see Ronny Baier in the Biographisch-Biibliographisches Kirchenlexicon online at http://www.kirchenlexicon.de/l/lamy_j_b.s. According Lamadrid, op cit.: “What became in time the Hispano homeland, the Upper Rio Grande is a vast arid region defined by a life-giving river that descends from the steep southern ranges of the Rocky Mountains through the barren plateaus of the north to the Chihuahuan desert of the south. It is the ancestral homeland of sedentary Tanoan and Keresan Pueblo Indian peoples, who diverted its waters and farmed its valleys, as well as nomadic Athabaskans (Apaches and Navajos) and Shoshoneans (Utes and Comanches), who roamed and hunted its mountains and deserts, alternately raiding and trading with the Pueblos” (“Nuevo Mexicanos).

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a strong puritanical Catholic position, and the Penitentes, seen to represent a superstitious and unruly version of Spanish Catholicism, was a member of the Penitentes, Padre Antonio José Martinez, remembered as a man who tried to stand up for Hispanic culture against the French bishop.125 For his efforts, the good Padre was told that he had been excommunicated.126 When the American Catholic authorities arrived in the region, they, along with most Anglo settlers, who were usually Protestant, “condemned and sensationalized the Brotherhood” of the Penitentes, which seemed to epitomize all that was feared and despised in the Spanish Church. This is ironic, not just because the brotherhood became more violent and secretive in the face of this opposition, but also because during the interlude when the Franciscan provincial government was made ineffective by the entrance of American troops and officials, the Penitentes yet again, as they always seemed to do, took over from the Spanish clergy and reasserted their independence as a nativist movement.127 Samora and Simon stress only the French cleric’s insistence on a tithe-based ecclesiastical government and vaguely hint at his “European Catholicism . . . [as] Counter-Reformational in nature and . . . characterized by a strong institutional and external identity” in opposition to the “Mexican religiosity [which] recognized and underscored the sacred as an integral part of everyday life experiences and beliefs of a people.” None of the bitter racial and national feelings roused by Lamy’s excesses is mentioned here, and his threats to excommunicate those who do not conform to his regulations: “Believers who did not support the church materially did not have the right to receive the holy sacraments.”128

125

126

127 128

Moises Sandoval, “Tres Padres Buenos/Three Good Priests”, The National Institute for the Renewal of the Priesthood online at http://www.jknirp.com/sandoval. An unsigned “Brief History of Taos: 19th Century and the Mexican Period” qualifies this information by saying that “if Lamy did excommunicate him it was only recorded at the village church of Arroyo Hondo near Taos, and he did not notify his superiors of the action. With the support of the people, Padre Martinez ignored the censure and continued to officiate, first as parish priest and later as a protestant minister, until he died July 28, 1867. He was buried by his Penitente brothers according to the wishes spelled out in his will. The actual location of his burial site is uncertain, but a commemorative headstone for Padre Martinez can be found at Kit Carson Park in Taos, close to Kit Carson’s grave” (online at http://www.laplaza.org/comm/ about_taos/history/19th_ century.). Lamadrid, op. cit. Samora and Simon, op cit.

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FOUR NEW QUESTIONS They may own many books inherited from their father, but, since they cannot understand, they never make use of them. Any information is concealed between the covers of the volumes. Whenever they hear a Ha[c]ham’s sermon, they are amazed at even the simplest thoughts. Never having read the Bible or the Shul[c]han Aruk, they know nothing of the obligation of the Jew. They have no knowledge, either of our history nor of the miracles that God has wrought for us. As a result, heaven forbid, it is very possible that the Torah will be forgotten by a majority of the Jewish people. — Yakoub Huli129

If the great Chacham (Rabbi) Yakoub Huli could lament so forcefully the ignorance of the Sephardim in Turkish lands in the early eighteenth century, what might he have thought of the other Sephardic victims of the Inquisition who, out of madness and despair,130 escaped in the other direction, to the far western lands across the Atlantic Ocean, and now lived at the very best as nominal Christians and at worst as fully believing and practicing Catholics, albeit always suspected of treachery and insincerity because of their ineradicable tainted blood? But Huli’s complaint has to be taken with a grain of salt, as part of his polemical argument to promote his new Judeo-Español (sometimes known as Ladino) commentary and paraphrase of the Hebrew Bible, that is, as an exaggerated bit of rabbinical rhetoric. Still, had he been aware of what was going on in Mexico, especially in the northern districts, where secret Jews were helping to form the brotherhood of the Penitentes, he might have been truly shocked and thrown into a profound state of grief. And yet, just as Huli exaggerates for effect in his statement made in 1730, so too those who dismiss the Penitentes then and now as all ignorant peons, illiterate and unsophisticated Catholics, and mock the Hispanics who today call for recognition of their New Christian backgrounds as social-climbers, racists 129

130

Yakoub Huli, Me’am Lo’ez cited by S. Alfassa Marks, “The Sephardic Classic of Constantinople: Me’am Lo’ez” online at http://www.sephardicstudies.org/mean-loez. (Seen 19/09/2003). Del Hayo gives an account of Doña Mariana whose long incarceration and torment in the dungeons of the Inquisition “ended by overwhelming her already confused reason and she lived insane for several years receiving the cruellest treatments: locked up in a room, chained, completely naked, attacked by furious insanity for long periods, followed by others of profound and black melancholy. March 25, 1601, at the age of 29 she was broken in person, strangled, and her body burned at the stake until consumed” (History of El Nuevo Reino, p. 61).

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and self-deluded fools — they too are exaggerating, distorting the historical complexities of the situation. We can therefore now, at the end of Chapter One, frame four new questions that seem not to have been raised before. Only after we have formulated these questions can we move into a possible fourth component in the formation of the Hermandad de Penitentes. These questions take into account, so far as possible, the recent studies on the Penitentes and the Crypto-Jewish or Marranos element that seems to be disguised within it. These are the four questions which lie behind everything that is presented in this book. As with the four questions that initiate the long explanations expounded in the haggadah of Passover, these formal problems drive the complex multi-pronged instrument of my investigations. (a) All other scholars tend to assume, with no discussion that the settlers in the region of New Mexico, Arizona and southern Colorado were just like those Europeans and Mexicans who settled elsewhere in the Spanish Empire, but why are these men and women different? Now that Stanley Hordes, Abraham Lavender and others in the Society for Crypto-Jewish Studies are asking who were these Marranos and where did they come from in Iberia and by what direct and indirect routes, identifying many by DNA, we can ask, rather, from which groups within the controversy over Rambam and Ramban did they come from and how did these spiritual and intellectual questions motivate their desire to remain within the Spanish Empire and inside Hispanic civilization, albeit on the very fringes of New Spain and thus outside the influence of further intellectual currents and commercial success? (b) In all other studies, it is generally assumed, again with no proof or interrogation, that the members of the Penitentes, from the foundation to the present, were good Catholics, probably all Old Christians in the technical sense used in Iberia from the middle of the fifteenth century, and separated from the rest of the Church and the Hispanic civilization by circumstances beyond their control. Now that the origins of the Penitentes have been traced through a great variety of Catholic movements during the late Middle Ages and into the period of Renaissance and Reformation, we can ask, not whether or not they represent a specific continuation of any particular order or movement, but rather how do they function within a community that both by force of geography and history, on the one side, and an inherent anti-clericalism on the other, chooses to exist without any regular pastoral care from priests, friars or other properly ordained clerics, that is, without the central rites of Eucharist and other sacraments? (c) All other studies which touch on the New Christians, whether Marrano, Crypto-Jewish or pious Catholic converso, the presumption is that there is such a difference between Jew and Christian, with no real space between 91

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except madness or cynicism or stupidity, that the real history of religion in Iberia is glossed over: neither the controversy between the Maimonideans and anti-Maimonideans is touched on, nor the differences between preTridentine Spanish and Portuguese practices, the influence of Erasmus and the Reformers, nor the profound changes brought about by the Counter-Reformation. Once we can grant that New Christians provided a disproportionate number of settlers in the founding people who moved up out of the commercial, mining and ecclesiastical centers of New Spain, how does the Crypto-Jewish and/or Marrano element within the Penitente brotherhoods sustain itself when virtually everything about the contextualizing community conspires to make them forget who they are, why they are there, and what their difference means? (d) Unless there has been a massive effort to hide, forge or destroy documentary evidence in all the extant archives of the Church, the State (Spanish, Mexican, and American), and private family and individual, why has there never been found any charges of judaizing raised against the Penitentes — or at least, any explicit accusations to that effect — while there are now dozens of instances of people voluntarily stepping forward to make these claims for themselves and their ancestors?

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After the Inquisition the mothers told their sons to keep silent, and they lived with the fear of death if they revealed their identity. It was like I was living all those experiences. I felt like I was being cut in pieces, as if the Body of the Messiah itself would be divided and dispersed. There is great pain for the thousands of Jewish souls that still today do not understand who they are. — Liliana Saez1 We have known for a long time already that Jewishconversos, even long after the Expulsion, continued reading Jewish philosophy and were expert Hebraists, such as fray Luis de León. They did this despite the prohibitions imposed by the Inquisition, which officially banned Jewish and Arabic studies from the middle of the 16th c. until the beginning of the 19th c . . . — David Ramírez2

1

2

“Liliana Saez, a member of Bet-el Messianic Jewish congregation in Bueno Aires” cited in Peter Hocken, The Marranos: A History in Need of Healing (Dallas, TX.: Toward Jerusalem Council II, 2006) p. 6. David Ramírez, “Sephardim,” p. 3.

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To a certain extent journalists and film-makers in the twentieth century have indeed — guilty as charged — exploited the activities of the Penitentes by stretching out of all proportion the scenes of bloody rituals of discipline, self-flagellation and crucifixion, as though that were all the brotherhood did. But for all this lurid interest in what they considered to be barbaric or savage customs, the popular entertainers — for that is what they were and are — did record in word and image the performances that we otherwise could barely imagine. In another sense, however, these still and moving pictures, like the excited descriptions in newspapers and magazines, balance out two other kinds of sources of modern information. On the one hand, those who approach the Penitentes through the intellectual lens of folklore studies, which is sometimes a sub-category of Anthropology, dealing with marginalized and repressed minorities within larger middle-class states and sometimes a separate discipline, a kind of updated version of antiquarianism (focusing on the residual customs rather than the material remains of national history), distort by classifying the members of the brotherhood as “folk”, uneducated, unsophisticated, and childlike in thought and behaviour. This is one of the main falsehoods this book sets out to move aside, not quite by throwing it out completely, lest we lose beautiful little water-babies still swimming under the surface, but just enough to show that there is something else happening in what David Ramírez calls “a world of shadows”3 where the Marranos, Anousim and Sephardim continued to play a game we have yet to describe, and whose rules — for there are rules to this game, although the playground shifts from place to place, and the time of

3

Obviously David Ramírez is here echoing José Faur’s book title, In the Shadows of History.

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the game is generally at night and with the lights off — we will expound in the final chapters of this book. On the other hand, too many professional historians and sociologists approach the Hermandad de Nuestro Padre Jesu Christ with a cold, unimaginative (positivistic) and virtually cynical point of view. For them, working strictly from written documents and especially from “facts and figures,” the Penitentes at best were founded in the last decade of the eighteenth century, spread in the wake of Mexican Independence, and flourished after the takeover by the United States government in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, what the brotherhood was and believed in, as well as practiced, can be known only through its own written records and the formal reports of ecclesiastical and lay officials. From that perspective, the picture that emerges is rather flat and thin: poor, isolated communities, desperate to receive the sacraments of the Church and anxious to provide the pastoral care usually unavailable from proper authorities, “make do” as best they can with limited resources and fragmentary knowledge, and so create a bizarre imitation of pre-Enlightenment Catholic rites. Note what a recent anonymous reviewer has to say online of the 1915 fiveminute long silent movie “The Penitentes” directed by Jack Conway:4 Based on a controversial novel by Robert Ellis Wales, The Penitentes was inspired by a real-life religious cult which thrived in 17th century Mexico. A group of fanatical Roman Catholics were so dedicated to their beliefs that they staged actual crucifixions on Good Friday. Not all of the victims of this practice were willing ones, which is why the film ends with a “race to the rescue” not unlike the climax in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.5

The passages I have emphasized seem the main lines of distortion and prejudice. Nevertheless, while speaking of the brothers as “a fanatical cult “oversteps the mark of propriety and comments on the whipping of naked females is pure fantasy,6 we would now accord such a religious sodality and labelling the men 4

5

6

Jack Conway was an assistant of the famous director D.W. Griffith, “the master.” Unfortunately, I can find no further information about Robert Ellis Wales’ 1915 novel, although it is clear that he was an active and popular local historian of the West around the turn of the nineteenth century. Anonymous, “The Penitentes: Overview” online at MTV Movies http://www.mtv.com/ movies/movie/70216/moviemain.j (Seen 1/06/2007). See also the notes at “Progressive Silent Film List,” copyright Carl Bennett, Silent Era online at http://www. silentera. com/PSFL/data/P/Penitentes1915; listing updated 13 October 2004 (Seen 1/06/2007). Wales also wrote the scripts for “Macbeth”(1916) “The Test of Honor”(1919); he had been chief technologist for Griffith’s “Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages” (1916), as well as other jobs in the early days of film-making in Hollywood. See “R. Ellis Wales”ImDb at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0907399. I have seen only the 35-minute, not the 70-minute version of the film, where there are no such images. I have discussed this and other early films and sensationalist newspaper

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who chose to undergo extreme disciple as “victims,” two other points are worthy of attention because they challenge the cold logic of professional history: (1) the origins of the Penitentes in the seventeenth century, (2) its continuity with religious practices in Mexico (that is, New Spain’s southern provinces), and (3) the rituals as “staged” events. In its 9 March 1936 number Time Magazine printed an unsigned news report entitled “Blood in New Mexico.” This essay describes in splashy prose how “One by one the brothers bowed before a Sangrador who with a jagged piece of glass gouged criss-crosses on their backs. The penitents would keep their wounds open and raw until Easter, often by rubbing rock salt in them.”7 The account is anything but objective, as, after indicating that “The Mother Church deplores the Penitentes,” it categorizes the brotherhood and its members as “[s]ecretive, savage toward meddling outsiders” and men who are “[w]hipped to a frenzy during Holy Week.” In spite of this grotesque view of the solemn rites of imitatio christi, the Time reporter gives a fairly accurate background of the brotherhood and its organization. If not accurate, then perhaps we ought to say, the report reveals more than the writer intends. For example, he says, “the blood brothers practiced their rites for hundreds of years without molestation,” which raises the question of how many hundreds of years — not to mention, without molestation from whom, since like so many modern accounts of the Penitentes there is no mention of the Inquisition. Another point: “When near Albuquerque last month [that is, supposedly on 5 February 1936]8 a writer named Carl Taylor was murdered by his [fifteenyear old] house boy [Modesto Trujillo], it was suggested [by whom?] that the killing was in retribution for an article written by Taylor on the Penitentes and subsequently published in Today.” The next remark seems to undercut this outrageous slander: “Nevertheless, in recent years the Penitentes have been photographed, and on Good Friday many a tourist goes ‘Penitente-hunting,’ to be foiled only if the brothers conclude their Lenten observances in the dead of night or in the most remote districts.” According to Marta Weigle, “On Monday, February 17, Trujillo was sentenced by Judge Fred E. Wilson to ninety-nine years in the state penitentiary.” But she adds, “District Attorney Thomas J. Mabry announced that his investigation showed conclusively that

7

8

reports of this sort to indicate the nature of the distortions, slanders and misunderstandings that the Penitentes have had to face and why therefore they choose to hide, deny and playdown their history. Anonymous, “Blood in New Mexico, Time (9 March 1936) available online at TIME in Partnership with CNN at http://www.time.com/time/timeprintout/0,8816,770109,00 (Seen 1/06/07). The additional information in square brackets comes from Marta Weigle, Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood: The Penitentes of the Southwest (Santa Fe, NM: Ancient City Press, 1976) p. 107.

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the Penitentes ‘had nothing to do with the murder.’”9 If it was customary for newspaper journalists, filmmakers and tourists to chase after the brothers in their religious performances, how did the alleged murder of Carl Taylor take place? Clearly the courts believed that this crime took place and saw it as unrelated to the houseboy’s connections to the brotherhood. Rather than asking why should someone suggest that the murder was part of a Penitente plot in revenge for writing about them, we perhaps ought to examine other dynamics involved, circumstances and forces that do indeed relate the event to the fears, suspicions and bigotry at play in the attitudes of all those involved? Local politics was an issue, with ramifications in control of voting blocks, commercial properties, and tourist potential. Whatever the truth, this murder and the bad light it shed on the Hermanidad did not go away, and it features in a nationally distributed film somewhat contemporaneous with the Time magazine article, The Lash of the Penitentes.10 All these sensationalist films and articles obscure many of the keen insights that the observers report and those professional scholars have either overlooked or brushed aside as “incidental” or “irrelevant.” We need to be alert to the deep anxieties and hatreds stirred up whenever the Penitentes are mentioned because these feelings help explain why secrecy was so strictly enforced and why the old strategies of disguise and cunning were still needed.

9

10

Weigle, Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood, p. 107. Weigle depends on contemporary newspaper accounts to flesh out this story. According to the anonymous description on IMDb, this 1937 film, directed by Roland Price and Harry Revier, with a script by Zelma Carroll, and starring Marie DeForrest, Wiiliam Marcis and Victor Justi, contains “[a]ctual footage of Penitentes — a sect of Catholic religious fanatics who engage in self-flagellation — is combined with new footage about a murder.” There is a British title, about twice as long, known as “The Penitente Murder Case.” One reader’s comment: “Plenty of shots of people being whipped and some of rural religious art, but mostly of interest to sadomasochists and sociologists.” Available at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029114 (Seen 8/12/2006). According to a synopsis ot msn.movies, citing Brian Gusse’s All Movie Guide: “The new footage included shocking (for the time) scenes of naked women being whipped” available at http://entertainment.msn.com/movies/movie.aspx?m=119802&. Also for photogrtaphs of the stars of the film, see “Full Cast and Crew for LASH OF THE PENITENTES (1937)” Cinefania Online (2000–2006) at http://www.cinefania.com/ movie.php/134599/en/b (Seen 8/12/2006).

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THE FOURTH INFLUENCE: MARRANOS AND CRYPTO-JEWS Frater fui draconum et socius struitonum I am a brother to dragons [jackals] and a companion to [the daughters of] owls [ostriches] Job 30:29

Any one or the other of the three historical sources already adduced — medieval flagellants, Third Order Franciscans, and Native Indian customs and beliefs — can also explain why Crypto-Jewish and Marrano families in this area would want to become members in such brotherhoods, since most of the individuals and groups of people with Sephardic backgrounds not only are sincerely devout Roman Catholics and conform in most external ways with the Mexican and Amerindian communities in which they live, but also, since they are often treated differently due to their backgrounds or at least perceive themselves to be still under suspicion long after the Inquisition was dissolved in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, they want to be seen as especially active participants in this strict but lay devotional institution. We could go back through all the evidence presented in the first part of this book to show how and where Crypto-Jews were present, at least by implication, in these various manifestations and stages of developing the Confraternity of the Penitentes. Even a local nun, like Julia Bolton Halloway, is today aware of these confluences of cultural and religious history. She thus writes, beginning to fill in the gaps left by the polemicists and local historians concerned only with the Hispanic or Mexican-American version of things: Penitentes, whose family names are those of Jewish conversos, came to the New World, founding the first American city, Santa Fe, Holy Faith, but were then isolated in New Mexico and Colorado, forgotten by the Church.11

This “forgetting” is at once a cause for shame in the Church, but also a consequence of the deliberate efforts by the Marranos to escape from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, to hide their true identities, and to use the rituals of the Penitentes to work out deeply embedded psychological trauma.

11

Julia Bolton Holloway, “The Crucifix: St Jerome, St Francis, Fra Angelico, Julian of Norwich and Georgia O’Keefe” (1997/2005) online at file://A:TheCrucifixStJeromeStFr ancisFra Angelico . . .

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MARRANO TESTIMONIES The Brotherhood’s origins may always remain shrouded in mystery and their ceremonies may frequently be misconstrued, but their importance to the continuation of the cultural heritage of New Mexico and the Catholic Church can never be denied . . . The faith and devotion of the Hermanos are quietly revealed in their moradas. Joined as one in their chapels, the Brothers relish the flavour of life as they pray and sing and speak to saints and angels and dead ancestors.12 Even if we do grant that a person might lay claim to Jewish heritage for ulterior motives, stretching that to claim actual observance by such impostors of Jewish practices long abandoned by most American Jews borders on the ridiculous.13

As we have already pointed out several times, there is a deep divide between the “received” history of the region and periods we are concerned with in which there is virtually no reference to Jews or Crypto-Jews or Marranos — all of them were la gente prohibida, the prohibited people14 — and the kind of history that takes the voices of people claiming to be descendants of Marranos or anousim seriously. Occasionally, the official documents and the academics who guard them scrupulously, to the point where oral testimonies and interpretations based on analogy are excluded, there is a passing remark, such as “The family was accused of having judaical [sic] tendencies, but was cleared by the Holy Office in Mexico City in 1663.”15 But that kind of negative information cannot stand on its own, without at least acknowledging that for hundreds of individuals and families the Audiencia was not benign, forgiving or careful in its assessment of the charge of judaizing. When we read the comments made by several of the Marranos who were interviewed by Gloria Golden in a recent collection of such reports, there seems to be a much deeper and more extensive aspect to the story of the Penitentes than is usually given — including even the few sympathetic remarks of Bolton cited above — which can be explained only in terms of this Crypto-Jewish membership. Not, of course, that the confraternity is everywhere conceived of in Jewish or converso terms, but rather — and this is my key argument — that 12

13 14 15

Michael Wallis, “Upon the Threshold of the Sacred” En Devina Luz: The Penitente Moradas of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994) p. 5. Shulamit C. Halevy, “Manifestations of Crypto-Judaism in the American Southwest.” That is, they were prohibited from entering the overseas Spanish Empire. Sanchez, “Spanish-Indian Relations”, n. 17, op. cit.

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once it became a popular movement, even from the earliest days of its inception in the New World, its secrecy, emotional intensity, and prestigious place in the local community made it attractive for Marranos who could, in those specific chapters or moradas in which they came to dominate, use for their own particular social and psychological needs. Felipe Ortega, for instance, remarks, first, that the Penitententes had social obligations of caritad (charity) and burial of the dead which match with central Jewish concerns otherwise difficult to maintain by communities forced to repress their outward duties as Jews. By joining this Catholic confraternity, secret Jews hoped they could perform these essential mitzvoth without risking suspicion of ecclesiastical authorities. In other words, Ortega says, “This was a means of achieving an end, to continue their understanding of Judaism.”16 But in the second place, Ortega sees more specific Jewish activities distorted into the practice of the Penitentes. In the following account, he recalls experiences as a child and interprets them through the knowledge gained subsequently as an adult who is familiar with Jewish rituals: It is clear to me [now] that there is a definite connection to Judaism as indicated by the following practices: During Holy [Easter] Week, the people in the community were served spinach with boiled eggs. This represented the bitter herbs served during the Passover Seder and were only served during Holy Week, which coincides with Passover. Also served during Holy Week, was a cracker pudding for the unleavened bread or matzah. Capirotada is the Ladino word for haroset. In places other than La Madera, this dish was made with leavened bread. During Holy Week, after Holy Tuesday (Wednesday to Saturday at noon), you had to have all work done. Wood had to be chopped, and water was brought inside. You couldn’t play outside or wash your hair. They had to make enough food for these days and couldn’t cook. Food could be warmed up. I think it was the same sensibility as the Sabbath. They transferred the Sabbath prescription of no work to Holy Week. They were so far removed from Judaism that they didn’t know how to follow Jewish rituals.17

This judgment on the state of knowledge of the adults with whom he grew up cannot be confirmed completely, of course. If the ceremonies were to be carried out in strict secrecy, it would have been important to keep any explanations away from young children who were not mature enough to be entrusted with such information. The bare minimum of practice would be taught, and the distinctions between Judaism and Catholicism deliberately blurred. Flora Campos, for instance, speaking of her family customs says that, as a young girl, “My understanding of Catholicism was that it was a secretive religion. They didn’t tell you everything”18 In a sense, that is true, especially from a child’s perspective, as the liturgy was still in Latin, and religious instruction was minimal 16 17 18

Golden, Remnants, p. 96. Ibid. Ibid, p. 108.

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and usually by rote recitation of the Catechism and prayers. In another sense, Campos may be expressing her intuitive grasp of the fact that often among Marrano families and communities the residual Jewish beliefs and practices were concealed inside Catholic formulae and rituals and any explanations were withheld from young people until, if at all, they showed signs of sufficient maturity and trustworthiness. In many instances one or more generations would be missed out on, and it was grandparents or even a great-grandparent who would instruct a chosen child to be the memory-keeper for the family. For instance, someone not interviewed by Gloria Golden, Grace Serrano Fenn tells us: “Their children were susceptible to being taken away, raped or placed in “Christian” families to raise — if they were cute, intelligent, etc.”19 Yet we cannot put aside completely the possibility that these customs were not understood at all as Jewish or even as deriving from ancestral Jewish traditions but were, at best, family ways of doing things that had no meaning outside of Catholic perceptions and sensibility. Even if the individuals and families realized that what they were performing was not the way other Catholic communities celebrated Easter during Holy Week, they did not necessarily suspect anything doctrinally dangerous in what they were doing. Only in relatively recent times have many (or any) individuals felt comfortable enough and had the educational means to undertake archival research into their backgrounds in order to retrieve some of their heritage, with varying consequence ranging from an enthusiastic return to formal Judaism, a kind of transitional movement into what is called Messianic Judaism which allows individuals and families to act out some of the superficial features of Sephardic worship while still embracing a Christian core of belief, a somewhat bemused enjoyment of the historical roots in Marranism and further back to Judaism, and a rather cold indifference to the phenomenon altogether. Degrees of sincerity cannot be neatly gauged, particularly when prejudices against Judaism and Crypto-Judaism still obtain both in the surrounding society and within the individuals themselves. Generations of caution and suspicion created deep ingrained attitudes amongst these people. Nevertheless, the weight of evidence makes the suspicion that for some Hispanic communities where Marrano families appeared in significant numbers the Holy Week customs were modified to carry special Crypto-Jewish meanings, and therefore, it may equally be suspected, that particular chapters or moradas20 19 20

Fenn, “Sephardim Hope Renewed”. A morada usually means a dwelling or abode, often quite humble, or it may mean, by synechdochic extension, a stay or period of residence. A homonym morado, which refers to that colour purple associated with a black eye, or more metaphorically with a rough or tough time, yields moradura, a bruise, and I think we can see the convergence in the Penitentes display of rough, violent, bloody rituals. A morada is therefore where and when they meet and what they inflict upon themselves. For a description of a photographic

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of the Penitentes associated with those families would also be modified to serve non-Catholic purposes. Non-Catholic does not necessarily mean anti-Catholic. But what these aspects were and how many of the chapters might have been exclusively or mostly composed of Crypto-Jews cannot easily be ascertained. Filberto Pacheco reports in his interview with Gloria Golden: It was rumoured in the family that we’re Jewish. However, it was never brought out. They were very secretive and deep into Penitente rites. They were always praying in the home in Mora, the northernmost outpost of the Spanish colonies.21

It seems likely therefore that many Crypto-Jews did go into the furthermost regions of the Spanish North American territories, and many of the settlers who went with Luis de Carvajal, when he was made governor of Nueva Leon — northern Mexico, sometimes known as The Kingdom of the Lion of Judah — took the opportunity to seek out even more isolated areas to hide. John Garcia has looked into the matter of his family’s genealogy fairly deeply. But how many is many? And where did he look — in family archives or in books he found in the public library? Did he interview relatives and neighbours or talk with community leaders? By one means or another, we are told, he traced the Garcias back into the sixteenth century and to the earliest Spanish conquest and settlement. Putting aside most of the specifics of his own background, it will be useful to cite some of his remarks. It is important to have these historical statements in the words of a descendant of the original families rather than in more objective historical texts because our concern is not so much with what actually may or may not have happened in the past as in the memories of the Secret Jews and the effect of these memories or their conduct and in the sense of identity in the present as well as the past. Thus he proudly claims: We are descendants of Lucas Garcias, on my paternal side, Diego Pérez da Acosta, on my maternal side, and Juan de Perea, both of our grandmothers’ ancestor. Diego Pérez da Acosta was a Portuguese Jew who ended up in Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico in 1630 during the discovery of silver. Juan de Perea was a Spanish Jew who was in on the conquest of Nueva Galicia (the Guadalajara, Mexico area) in 1525. Lucas Garcia was a member of the oldest Jewish settlement in the New World. A relative of his was Luis de Carvajal who was the governor of El Nuevo Reino de León, a vast area of northeastern Mexico that was granted to him by the King of Spain . . . When the Inquisition arrested Luis Carvajal in about 1592, the settlers

21

exhibition of Penitente moradas, termed “essentially fraternity houses with a chapel, meeting room and workroom”, see Michael Paglia, “Down New Mexico Way” Westword (22 February 1996) and made available online in 2005 at http://www,westword.com/ issues/1996-02-22/culture/art_print. Golden, Remnants, p. 100.

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scattered, some of them changing their names. Lucas Rodriguez Castaño de Sosa became Lucas Garcia . . .22

Fenn then adds that “Many times, names were changed or whole families held this secret from their own children regarding their true identity for safety reasons. Many of these families (including my own) lived in secrecy with a double life.”23 In another place, Garcia reports more about the family background and the nature of the circumstances in which the Crypto-Jewish families found themselves after the arrest and execution of Luis de Carvajal by the Holy Office. What is interesting here is that what he says mostly is not spoken about in the standard histories of Mexico or New Mexico. They are specific, intimate details that belong to private archives, family traditions, and painful memories. The terror of the Inquisition was so intense, that our ancestors dropped many of their Jewish practices. Practices were prohibited, and the Jewish heritage blurred. We came from Marrano families, keeping in the back of our minds that we were Jewish. My ancestor’s aunt [ . . . ] had her arm twisted eight times around before telling the inquisitors what they wanted to hear — that she was a professing Jew. She confessed and was burned at the stake for being “an obstinate and perfidious Jew.” . . . Our ancestors saw what happened and went undercover. In 1590, Luis Carvajal, El Mozo [the Younger]24, made penance to the Inquisition and said, “OK, we’ll become Christians.” But he never stopped his activities as a rabbi. His religion was not perfect. By the time of his generation, there were no materials to teach the faith. He didn’t have much in the way of ritual. Still he persevered. Finally in about 1596, he was burned at the stake . . . Prior to his being killed, he defiantly told the inquisitors that there were only a handful of Christians in Mexico and that the vast majority of the Spaniards were in fact Jews (Remnants, p. 126).

Two matters in particular have to be discussed here in response to these last paragraphs. First, whether or not John Garcia learned all these historical facts only from books he has been reading in the last several years or has used that 22

23 24

Golden, Remnants, p. 125. On Gaspar Castaña de Sosa, Lieutenant-Governor of Nuevo Léon in 1590, see Rothman, Promise Beheld and the Limits of Place,” pp. 27, 28, etc. Fenn, “Sephardim Hope Renewed”. Martin A. Cohen, trans. “The Autobiography of Luis de Carvajal, the Younger” and “The Letters and Last Will and Testament of Luis de Carvajal, the Younger” in The Jewish Experience in Latin America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, vol. 1 (New York: Ktav, 1971), pp. 201–312; both essays appeared originally in PAJHS 55 (1966).

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sophisticated research to elaborate and bolster fragmentary memories of his family, his testimony here provides a living link to the defiance of his ancestors who stood up to the Inquisition or who made great efforts to escape and hide from its agents. Second, what is selected for emphasis along with the justifiable pride in his ancestors’ attempts to sustain their Judaism under increasingly difficult circumstances, is the fear that enveloped the whole historical experience of the Marranos in the New World. It is important to keep in mind a further statement he makes in the course of his interview with Gloria Golden, a personal statement on the continuation of the attitudes that faced the Sephardim who had hoped that by escaping to the New World they would be safe from the dangers institutionalized in Portugal and Spain: I believe the Catholic Church is so strong in Latin America because of the Inquisition. The Inquisition lives well because so many Christians won’t accept your return to Judaism. A few weeks ago, on September 11, 2002, there was an interfaith service at Temple Mt. Sinai to signify the remembrance of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. Present at that service was the head of the Peace and Justice Commission of the diocese of El Passo. This man asked if I attend services in the synagogue. My response was that I do and that the services are beautiful. He told me that he objected to my coming to these services (Remnants, p. 128).

Remember, there are many popular books about the history of Mexico and New Mexico that never even mention the Inquisition, or merely in a passing aside, as of little or no importance to the people who lived in these regions in the first few hundred years of European settlement. What the interviewees bring out, therefore, is a sense of living reality quite at odds with the considered judgments of professional academic historians. It is under these circumstances, continuing into the present, that so many Marrano families associated themselves with the confraternity of the Penitentes. I suggest that there is more than just a convenient institution for disguise that the brotherhood offered. The extreme self-inflicted violence that virtually defines the Penitente movement serves the psychological function of working out powerful and ambiguous guilt feelings many of the Marranos feel as devout Catholics for their Judaic memories and activities. Another person interviewed by Gloria Golden has undertaken to investigate his family’s possible Crypto-Jewish background is Henry Parra. I found that my family, the Parras, and on my maternal side, the Lópezes, came to New Mexico with the conquistador Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado between 1540 and 1542 . . . They came exploring, looking for gold and silver . . .25

25

Golden, Remnants, p. 146.

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Again, while he cites books he has found in this research, the important thing for us is the curiosity to discover his genealogical roots in the earliest days of Spanish settlement and his willingness — even pride — in acknowledging a Sephardic connection. The thing was there might be a Sephardic link. In 1681, after the Spaniards had been chased out of New Mexico in 1680, Antonio de la Parra went to the area of Pueblo de San Antonio de Padua de Casas Grandes (probably to a place which became known as El Real De Corralitos) . . . I think my family was into mining and exploration. In 1682 . . . Antonio de la Parra was joined, perhaps upon notification of mineral discovery, by people from the village of Old Cerrillos in northern New Mexico which included the prominent family of Carvajals. (Remnants, p. 146)

That connection with the Carvajal family is a key factor both for Henry Parra and for our understanding of the way in which Marranos moved as far as they could from the main centres of inquisitorial control and, then, as we shall see, helped to establish the confraternity of Penitentes as a means of protecting their place in the developing society and controlling the contradictory and often violent and bloody rages they experienced within themselves. Parra then continues his account, blending his book-knowledge with family memories: Carvajals were Jewish [by which is meant Crypto-Jewish or suspected Judaizers]. I remember reading that a Carvajal was actually put to death by the Inquisition in Mexico City long ago. Similarly, Parras, Lópezes and most of my kin are families which were identified by the Catholic Church in Spain and the Inquisition to be of Jewish descent or suspect thus . . . I’ve learned all this through my genealogical study. To this day, we have Carvajal relatives. These families were instrumental in founding the area because of mining. I think Parras, and some of our close kin such as Carvajales, Galindoes, Martínezes, Rodrígueses, and Valencias, to name a few, came together. We kind of stuck together. Families married within their own. As soon as Spaniards under De Vargas reconquered New Mexico from the Indians in 1692, many of the displaced families gradually moved back along the Rio Grande in New Mexico.26

In addition to his own study, Parra reports that he has made contact with another branch of the family doing archaeological and genealogical research, and found out “there once existed a community of conversos or crypto-Jews there. The Parras and Carvajales, to name a few of my kin, were prominent in that area”.27 His conclusion conforms to other evidence in various sources, but at the same time puts different emphases on the “facts” and interprets the details in ways quite differently from the standard textbooks, whether they are objective 26 27

Golden, Remnants, p. 146. Ibid, p. 147.

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histories or apologetics of Catholic settlement in the region. “The remoteness of New Mexico . . . was obviously good to get away from a Catholic Church intolerant of religious diversities and freedom and, of course, the Inquisition”.28 The escape by Sephardim from the Inquisition in Mexico City and other large towns was, first of all, into geographical space but it was, as well, an escape into cultural silence. This silence can be registered in many ways: in terms of the absence of authoritative ecclesiastical officials denouncing the individuals and families by name or by type; in terms of a private retreat into the domestic and intimate silence of the family in its strictest sense as opposed to public and community social life; and another form of silence, more like static and noise, because the increasing isolation — and alienation from inner senses of a conflicted self — added to the secrecy inside the family meant that only a chosen few in each generation might carry on the dangerous information and customs, while most children or cousins might have little or no idea of what was going on. It was only the noise of whips ripping into raw flesh and “the doleful chanting” of the procession of flagellants in the brotherhood during Holy Week that registered in their memories. If there were prayers and study, most of the children were unaware — they could usually not be trusted. Grace Serrano Fenn recalls, giving some evidence that not only books in the old Judeo-Español were passed down the generations, but also some knowledge of Hebrew . . . many of the men would have to gather in secret to study the Bible (Torah). Many of these families had brought and handed down Bibles from Spain that had been translated into Spanish during the “Golden Age”. Men met in secret and children were brought in for “devotions” where prayers were recited. In my family, by my oldest uncle who knew his Hebrew prayers (possibly in the Ladino language) had this task . . . prayers were conducted usually by the oldest son. Scriptures were read by the women (daughters) in the family in later years. Mothers (like my grandmother Felicitas) taught their children, but feared for their families. Grandmother tried to be a good Converso. She trembled when my father would dare read to her from the New Testament.29

Because of these intense fears and anxieties, with the family identity so precarious and tenuous over time, it is surprising that any conscious connections with the Judaic past survived the four hundred years of Crypto-Jewish history. Thus Fenn goes on in her confession about her family in the very recent past and shows how dangerous it was for children to overhear the family’s secrets: Grandfather Pantaleon was a leader in the community {which probably means he was a member of the Penitentes] and men would often gather in secret for study in 28 29

Golden, Remnants, p. 147. Fenn, “Sephardic Hope Renewed”.

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my father’s home. According to my father, Jose Muro Serrano, youngest of 10, the children were not allowed in the same room. My father would sometimes listen to grandfather’s conversations when no one knew he was hiding close by. His father was like the “Rabbi” for this secret community.30

What seems to be central to this whole Marrano experience is, not so much a shared community of faith in memory or the memory of faith, as Nathan Wachtel suggests; but rather, as we can begin to see in the following statement from James Abreu, an almost visceral, largely unconscious sense of painful alienation from the surrounding community, a constant unease and distrust of neighbours and even family, and, not least, a profoundly troubled lack of inner security and identity: I always had the feeling that you don’t talk to neighbors or share a lot. You would stay within your own group. Older people had friends, but they didn’t reveal much to them. My great-grandmother, who spoke only Spanish, and her daughter, Jane, my mother’s mother, was always saying, “You don’t talk to neighbors about your family.” They were secretive. It was kind of what’s in the house stays in the house. Keep family secrets.31

More despondent in tone, however, is Jo Roybal Izay and therefore she is closer to the somatic introjection of the trauma that was the Marrano experience: Many Jews brought bags of gold that they had mined in Zacatecas, New Spain, hoping to build great cities and universities in New Mexico. They so wanted to rebuild the lives they had in Spain. According to legend, the gold remained buried in the wilderness where the people remained trapped. Their hopes and dreams vanished. They were hopeless and helpless. They were forgotten by the outside world. The poor souls were known only to those living among them, and lived and died with no one to record their suffering.32

It is when we come in touch with these painful memories of suffering and the legends — one might want to say public dreams or myths — that the role of the Penitentes becomes more striking. Izay starts to draw the connection in regard to a specific historical moment and this may be, not the origin of the phenomenon or even a typical instance, but rather a variant on many uncoordinated events of a similar sort of need to institutionalize and articulate the deep psychological pains in a social and bodily way: In 1850 [four years after New Mexico became a territory of the United States], the infamous Archbishop Lamy took over the diocese. The first thing he did was to excommunicate Spanish priests and raise havoc with the Penitentes, a religious sect. 30 31 32

Fenn, “Sephardic Hope Renewed”. Golden, Remnants, p. 154 Ibid, p. 156.

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Jews feared a gringo inquisition and joined the Catholic Church in droves. Others, like my ancestors who felt they had to live a separated life, joined the Presbyterian Church in order to read their Bibles openly and without prejudice. In reality, they went underground because there was a lack of Presbyterian ministers and it was perfect for them.33

In this version of history, the drive against Spanish priests and Penitentes is similar, though unstated, as a “gringo inquisition” but we may take both objects of this attack as coded names for Crypto-Jewish disguises. By “Jews” is meant, it would seem, practicing Jews, and therefore Ashkenazi rather than Sephardic families in the area. To escape from anti-Semitism, the “Jews” join the Catholic Church, but Izay’s ancestors, who are Hispanic New Christians, separate from the Catholic Church, fearing that they will be subject to a new wave of discrimination. They want to read the Bible openly — from other testimonies we find similar statements particularized to the Old Testament. By joining the Presbyterian Church, which has a dearth of ministers — and therefore is virtually inexistent — they can continue to live apart and in secret. As for Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814– 1888), we will discuss him later and why he is considered “infamous.”34 The conclusion Grace Serrano Fenn reaches is close to our own, although phrased in more plaintive tones because it is her own family experience she is speaking of: The psychological backlash of such a life is yet to be analyzed, but the confusion it perpetuated is extensive, from my personal point of view. The constant awareness of never belonging (we always felt different, almost without a country), the confusion and roots of rejection have been felt strongly. The “toxic waste” of spiritual and psychological baggage from the family line is something that must be contended with as a result of this type of lifestyle [sic].35

Before we continue to analyse these kinds of testimonies from persons who claim that they and their ancestors were Crypto-Jews or Marranos in communities where their ancestors also became brothers in the Penitentes and move forward in analysis of the confusions and their consequences, we have to try to sum up some of the evidence presented in this and the first chapter. If there were New Christians amongst the hermanos, not just in the last two or three generations, but in formative periods of the history of the brotherhood and of the Mexican communities in the territories isolated initially from Mexican and later American rule, then several new kinds of questions raise themselves concerning the nature of the Penitentes and of the Marranos in such communities, and therefore, too, 33 34

35

Golden, Remnants, p. 147. Thomas J. Steele, SJ, trans. and ed., Archbishop Lamy: In his own Words (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000). Fenn, “Sephardic Hope Renewed”.

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questions about the place of silence, invisibility and duplicity in the organization and conduct of marginal peoples who sustain their independence and identity over many generations — and through many changing traumatic circumstances.

A NEW OVERVIEW OF PENITENTES AND MARRANOS IN THE NEW WORLD Therefore, let each one of us prepare a secret cell within his soul and thought where we can contemplate his blessings from God . . . — Teresa de Cartagena36 Descendants of Sephardic Jews who fled the Inquisition in Spain, the family joined Los Hermanos Penitentes. This secretive society of lay Catholic men in Northern New Mexico, who believe in emulating Christ’s Passion, his trial, his walk, and his suffering on the cross at the end of each Lenten season, was used for a dozen generations as a shield to the family to disguise their Crypto-Jewish identity while they struggled with the legacy bestowed upon them.37

Returning to the historical situation in 1598 when the first recorded flagellation occurred by Don Juan de Oñate on his way into New Mexico,38 it is now possible to suggest that these soldiers, administrators and settlers included a large component of New Christians — or let us say Crypto-Jews — who accompanied or soon after followed Luis de Carvajal. Therefore, the tradition of penitential selfflagellation may be a manifestation of the Marrano’s visible and somatic Christian devotion, of the guilt experienced as suspected and self-distrusted judaizers, and self-punishment as secret Jews for participating in Christian worship and imperial conquest of another despised people. Granted that precarious and tenuous link to the past as a condition of secrecy, nevertheless one of the key signs of a Marrano connection is often in the very intensity of Catholic belief and practice above and beyond normal, such as belonging to the Penitentes and 36

37

38

Teresa de Cartagena, “Wonder at the Works of God” The Writings of Teresa de Cartagena, ed. and trans. Dayle Seidenspinner-Núñez (Woodbridge, Suffolk. And Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 1998) p. 101. Publisher’s note on the backcover of Ray Michael Baca, Brotherhood of the Light: A Novel about the Penitentes and the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico, ed. Andrea Alessandra Cabello (Mountainview, CA: Floricante Press, 2005). Unfortunately, this bit of puffery is more enlightening about the ostensible topic than Baca’s narrative fiction. Beasley, “Among the Penitentes”, op cit.

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making that membership a crucial distinction of the family from others, whether of Spanish, Basque, Mexican or American Indian background too.

THE PROBLEM OF MARRANO TRADITION AND EXPERIENCE En otra occasion Andrés declaró que Diego guardaba en una faltriquera una figura ceremonias y que también las realizaba en compañia de Rui Pérez vitiendo ambos ciertas ropas blancas. Carta de fray Martín de León de la Orden de Santo Domingo dirigia al Comisario del S[anta] O[fició] en Manila, Septiembre, 159739

Deeply embedded with the problems we are dealing with in this book are questions quite distinct from those historians and sociologists, or folklorists and anthropologists, seem to pose when they examine the phenomenon of CryptoJews and Marranos in the lands of the Penitentes. Everything is obscure and often buried, as with the items mentioned in the denunciation of the suspected judaizer Diego Hernández Victoria, a native of Oporto, by his erstwhile friend Rui Pérez. The event is recorded in a document held in the archives of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the Philippines, which was then part of the jurisdiction of New Spain or Mexico, although there was some attempt to send suspects to the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa, India. It seems so close to say as the modern editor of this late sixteenth-century text does that the “figure in the pouch” was a pair of tflillin, that is, phylacteries, and that the “white robes” worn by the accused were typical garments of men in synagogue during the High Holy Days. So easy but still so much of a guess. Even if we could be sure that these were ceremonial objects, how do we know that the men understood their significance and historical importance, let alone their spiritual meanings? They could have been almost anything that a jealous and mendacious rival wanted them to mean and that someone like Juan de Maldonado, the Dominican friar to whom the report was made, wanted to hear. Rather than worrying about random customs and stray beliefs which may or may not be analogous to current American Jewish attitudes and behaviours or even to long-lost or forgotten Sephardic traditions, we want to set up a perspective that asks about how a national identity could be sustained for 39

Cited by Eva Alexandra Uchmany, “Criptojudíos y Cristianos nuevos en la Filipinas durante el siglo xvi” The Sepahrdi and Oriental Jewish Heritage: Studies, ed. Issachar BenAmi (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1982) p 99.

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hundreds of years in conditions of hostility, separated from knowledge and techniques of intellectual and spiritual reinforcement. For this set of phenomena is not exactly the same as that which all Jews have faced in the time of their exile, a time that has also been that of their remembering and midrashing. When the small groups of New Christians trekked up the Camino Real into the fringes of the Spanish Empire in the northernmost parts of Old Mexico, they entered a land of ghosts and demons — a place where the usual hostilities of Christianity and Empire had not yet established themselves. For the most part, instead of silver the explorers found salt lakes, instead of rich farmland cold, rocky soil and sand, instead of eager converts to Catholicism suspicious and rebellious Indians. It was something like the experience of the Children of Israel wandering through the deserts of Sinai after crossing the Red Sea, except there was no Moses or Aaron or Miriam, no giving of the Law and perhaps only the false vision of the Golden Calf. But what, first of all, is exile: galut? Exile by itself is more than a specific set of events; it is also a moral, psychological, and spiritual condition of being, with positive as well as the more obvious negative qualities attached to it.40 Though many other peoples — as individuals or large groups — have been forced into exile, wandering and resettlement in diverse lands, some hostile, some friendly, the main differences between their experience and those of the Jews may be set out as follows: 1. For Jews, exile from the Holy Land is simultaneously the extinguishing of the sacred, national and judicial existence of Israel, whose institutions are destroyed, razed to the ground and declared inoperative. 2. Forced out from their national homeland, Jews enter into an already existing Diaspora, a dispersion into many different lands, in each of which they are a despised, disadvantaged and occasionally tolerated minority. Even the holy names are erased from the geography of history, Israel turned into Palestina, Jerusalem into Ǽlia Capitolina, and their own Holy Name of Israel usurped into Novus Israël and the Sacred Scriptures into the Old Testament or the Dead Law of Moses. 3. The religion of the Jews is transformed in essential ways, ranging from the substitution of the synagogue for the Temple, rabbis for priests, study for sacrifice, all the way to adjustment of the Law as an Oral Torah to supplement, define and recreate the Written Torah. 4. New modes of judicial, mystical, educational and social relations have to be invented and related to one another and to the contextual and hegemonic cultures where Jews find themselves. 5. The national archives and memory having been lost, the Jew must create new versions of how to inscribe the Law and remember what it will mean.

40

Shmuel Trigano, Le Temps de l’exil. (Paris; Manuels Payot, 2001).

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6.

The Jewish memory is reconstituted in the endless commentaries of mishnot and midrashim. The length of time through which the exile is experienced and the diversity of adjustments to other cultures in itself creates new modes of selfexpression and operational strategies.

According to Shmuel Trigano, a person is sent or chooses to go into exile, to be forced out of the familiar territory of his or her life and to undertake a reorientation in space, time, mentality and ultimate meaning. Going into galut makes the individual or the group suddenly aware, as they have not been in the past and as their hitherto friends and neighbours cannot be, aware of where they have grown up and established their identities. Yet, for Holy Israel, which now defined itself by memories (souvenirs) and legal principles and precepts (mitzvoth), wherein the nation is constituted by loyalty to the Law and the institutions to preserve, study and apply it under these ever-shifting circumstances, the galut is not only the experience of being cut off from the familiar, of loss and confusion, and discovering the need to recreate oneself in a new place and a new culture and language. It is also a realization of the nature and limits of that previously unquestioned identity: an exposure of the naked roots of history, with a consequent need to refocus on the parameters and significance of memories, of memories that not only stretch deep into the darkness (tinieblas) of the individual and group past but also which emerge of the moment of realization itself, a revelation of an identity which begins to construct itself under the impetus of a new and shocking awareness of the self in relation to all that is other than this emerging self-conscious identity. Trigano further distinguishes the Abrahamic sense of exile from that of the Socratic, the Jewish from the Hellenic, which are not absolutely and mutually exclusive but related sufficiently to interinanimate (to use one of John Donne’s metaphysical terms) one another in subsequent thought. Whereas the classical Greek perspective discloses a soul which is separated from the world of sensuality and the historical, the ancient Judaic sensibility learns from exile how to live in the world as an acutely self-aware mind and consequently to plunge into history with a mission that is not limited by specific times and places. The decision of Abram to heed the call to leave the land of his father, of idolatry, of mythic attachment to the senses and the imaginary reproduction of collective anxieties in unquestioned stories of gods within nature and time transforms him into Abraham, a man who makes a creative choice to move beyond historical unquestioning and superstitious certainties. Detached from the limited realities of ritual and idol, the Abrahamic exile identifies with the experience of exile itself, with the textures of language which become more and other than the antecedents of and references to exteriority: the new deracinated world is interior and substantial, permanent because of its capacity to expand through 113

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interpretation, open to the future because it is constantly returning to the pastthe past that stretches back beyond the memories of myth (Mircea Eliade’s myth of the eternal return) into the constitutive creation of meaningfulness. The exile is born, Trigano suggests, within the tension of a departure and a return, a departure from an endless present in which the future is only a return to an endlessly repeating creation, a return to a past that impels one’s consciousness from the present into the future beyond the limitations of self. However, this concept of the galut — separation, isolation, and alienation — is physical as well as psychical, geographic and chronological. The interior territory of the self is also a substance of language. Just as we speak within (not with a) language, so too we live within a language that is the substance of our real lives, a language that generates this interior space. Within this self-generating interiority we are strangers, others to the self that lives only on the exterior, the surface of symbol and metaphor, of myth and ritual, this condition of alterity being also the condition of understanding and transforming the world. Again, in a Jewish sense, Trigano echoes the pointed command that a Jew remember to treat the stranger in our midst as one of us because we were once strangers in a strange land. To be an exile in the galut means to remember that we are not an unquestioned concomitant of history or nature when perceived as myth and ritual — mirrored surfaces reflecting one another; but rather that we are all self-creating, self-creative beings responsible for and able to transform the world of our linguistic interiorities. Implied in Trigano’s long essay are insights to be parsed, reassembled, and re-interpreted. The Golden Calf is not merely a cheap imitation (simulacrum or eidolon) of the already false gods of Egypt, a reflection in the melted-down jewellery of the women in the desert longing for a return to a place of familiarity and hence a kind of security blanket, but an image (tselem) of the self as slave, ignorant and superstitious, blind to the realities that cannot be seen without the guidance of revelation and then constructed by the methods of midrash. At the same time, Gershom Scholem points out that Jews in exile tended to parse this notion of the tselem further. This word used in the opening verses of Genesis to signify the “image” of God which is placed into the created form of the first human beings at the time of their conception, and there has a positive sense of incorporating the capacity for moral decision-making and ethical actions based on the play of free will, also has a negative side. Always framed by its sense of a “plastic image or form”, tselem, Scholem points out, also contains the archaic root, tsel, shadow, and hence can also be considered of the dark side,41 the sittra acha, where seductive evil lurks, along with the creative 41

Gershom Scholem, “Tselem: The Representation of the Astral Body” (1962) from Von der mystischen Gestalt der Gottheit: Studien zu Grundbegriffen der Kabbala (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977) 249–271, trans. Scott J. Thompson (1987) online at Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate http://www.wbenjamin.org/scholem.html (Seen

6 August 2008). 114

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sparks of energy from the original shattering of the vessels of light out of which the world was created. Hence the apt citation from the Zohar in Scholem’s essay: As soon as the soul enters the world, the Tselem comes to her and joins with her, and grows with her, as it is said: yes, man advances in the Tselem. In this Tselem are a man’s days prefigured and upon it they depend, as it is thus said (Job 8:9): “because our days on earth are a shadow”, and this is to be understood with mystical precision [for the shadow, Tsel, itself an omen of a man’s lifespan, is none other than the Tselem, which appears externally].

In galut, therefore, which is also dispersion and wandering, we do not repeat and return to an unchanging world: Holy Israel in exile travels through a creative and uncertain present, always connected to the past and always responsible for a future that is taking shape before us. In fact, for the Sephardim in their new Diaspora, galut is much more than repetition, reflection, random wandering: It is more than an odyssey — a journey home through the shadow-lands of history, delayed by sufferings and forgetting: it is also tikkun ha-olam, creation, refraction and repair, and a movement which sees in the image of the past the ideals of the future. Hence, unlike the Homeric errores or the Socratic exile, for whom the past is a negative disengagement with the world and its uncertainties, from which forgetting is a necessary goal, the Abrahamic individual and people do not seek disengagement but sanctification within the created world and its history, who engage with the future because they create and correct it from moment to moment, who are freed by the uncertainties, and are guided by the memories which must not be forgotten. These historical memories no longer cloy and enslave, like the succulent and luscious lotus plants Odysseus’ Greek sailors found so tempting, or as moments of forgetful returns to the eternally reproduced act of creation; they are now words to be interpreted and, in being re-interpreted, transformed into new acts of creativity, never the same, always shimmering with possibility, even as they are fraught with moral terror. The exile of Israel is not freed from the shackles of the past, as in the ancient Greek philosophical argument, but released into the world from the prison of idols and superstition. The stranger is no longer the ger (the alien inassimilable to the certainties of the mythic nation) but the one who may gar, inhabit the language-reality of the interior world we all share because all are exiles from the Garden [gan] of Eden, from the Deluge, and other events which signal the breaking away from certainty, the rupture from a harmony with nature and history that reduces the human soul to a thing without a future or a creative responsibility. We seek the shield of heaven [mogan] to protect us, but, until it is found, we can only keep moving, keeping our disguises on, changing our masks . . . And then seeing in this refracted mirror-image of the other our own selves, the dissociated and split-off alter-ego, whose sinfulness and fearfulness must be atoned for in acts of penitence. 115

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“traumatized people” — those who have been split off from their home-identities and reformed in the image of their persecutors — “relive the moment of trauma not only in their thoughts and dreams but also in their actions.”42 Thus, unfortunately, the ger b’galut, the wandering Jew in eternal exile is all too often transformed by the imagination of the other, the goy, and the introjection of his own persecuting otherness into the pariah, the scapegoat, the inassimilable other by the dominant nations (goyim) of the world. And so, according to Trigano, while the Abrahamic individual experiences the interior space of free will, chosenness, and creative thinking, there is also the painful suffering of further exile — expulsion, forced assimilation (conversion) or massacre (pogroms). These are the very conditions that give creative freedom to the exile but cause animosity, fear, and rejection by those who are locked into myth and ritual. How the Jew wishes to live within the world is not how the others who cannot tolerate the condition of otherness do all too often treat him. Even more paradoxically, Trigano explains, when the Abrahamic exile does leave the galut and enters the Promised Land, of Israel, the situation does not permit an end either to the sufferings of the intolerable other or to the distortions of the relations to the stranger within. Though Eretz Yisroel is at once the Land that is Promised, the Holy People who will return, and the sacred ideal of the restored and sanctified nation under the Law, the poor and miserable Jew who returns from galut to the Israel of his memories finds himself or herself lost still in the external world of ghosts and demons, where myth and murder impinge, invade, and prevent the outpouring of abundance. While Trigano does not deal in concrete terms with the history of modern Israel and the discussions of exile cannot be tracked along specific events in the contemporary world, we can see glimmerings of fresh ideas to use in our discussion of the Crypto-Jews and Marranos who formed part of the Hispanic communities who centred their social and spiritual lives around the blood-brotherhood of the Penitentes. Trigano’s short book closes by comparing the three main paths of exile that seem to be available: the Platonic, the Buddhist and the Jewish. The author implies strongly that the third choice is that which gives most hope for living in a responsible and creative and therefore meaningful way. There are, however, too many uncertainties in his argument to know if this is not just a philosophically stronger case or a hard-nosed historical prediction. Our focus is on a different kind of exile: the one that goes into the waste spaces of the American Southwest, seems to assimilate with the Hispanic settlers who are abandoned, neglected, and all but excommunicated from the Church, and somehow finds a way to midrash a new image of tikkun ha-nefesh, repair of the troubled soul. 42

J.L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992) cited by Lisa Goldman and Jay Peters, “Persecutory Alters and Ego States: Protectors, Friends, and Allies” Dissociation: Progress in the Dissociative Disorders 8:2 (June 1995) 93.

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With this in mind, we can turn back to the series of discussions and interviews with men and women who claim a traditional identity as anousim. One of the most systematic researchers amongst the men and women interviewed by Gloria Golden is Dr. Maurillio Vigil. Using the Archives of the Indies in Seville, he has traced his family back to a Juan Montes Vigil who came to the New World in 1611. Maurillio’s own father, he says, “was a Catholic and a Penitente” (Remnants, p. 168) and had little to say about any Sephardic past. He infers that this little was because not much was known and that topic was not something to be spoken about. In regard to his family, however, thanks to his own investigations, Dr. Vigil discovers a general outline of migration that will stand for most other Marrano groups. Those who entered into contrataciones with the Spanish crown to settle in the new colonies of the Indias, he says, . . . had to prove that they were sin mancha, without any taint (without traces of Jewish blood) and that they were strong Catholics. They had to show it very definitively. A person had to go through a lot of examination. For some reason, Juan Montes’ parents had died, and he had to be sponsored by his uncle who happened to be the equivalent of a city councilor in the community. He had to testify that he (Juan Montes Vigil) came from a family of strong Catholics with a strong military tradition of serving The Crown. The authorities were very explicit that there could not be a Jewish connection.43

Thus far the account would seem to bolster the argument that any modern claims to a Judaic background have to be false since it is unlikely that any New Christian could pass through any cracks in the Spanish investigative system. However, we are dealing with a pre-modern society whose bureaucracy was still enmeshed in feudal principles of personal ties. Moreover, other sources confirm that the Spanish officials were notoriously open to bribery and influence, and that certificates of “pure blood” and membership in various military orders could be purchased without too much trouble if the proper “gifts” were proffered. Still more — and this takes us into the most critical aspects of the historical problem — the more insistently pure and devout the petitioner for a royal contract was, the more likely he was a Crypto-Jew trying to escape from the Inquisition. What follows in Vigil’s testimony bolsters this last likelihood. This may have been a formality, but it was a formality they did follow strictly. If it’s a formality, why did they need people to testify on their behalf? Montes Vigil had all kinds of people testify as to his character. Juan Montes Vigil was not wealthy. He had to find a sponsor, and a man by the name of Jacinto de Olmos sponsored him. Vigil was classified as a criado (servant).44 43 44

Golden, Remnants, p. 168. Ibid, p. 168.

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The explicit question is unanswered and the others are not asked. The reason why petitioners were required to have persons to testify on their behalf is because the documents could not be trusted. But how did a criado gain a sponsor and the requisite documents and testimonials? We can only suspect, in context, that he was part of a network of Crypto-Jews arranging to transport fellow New Christians into the New World. Dr. Vigil implies this by leading up to the point of his question by speaking of his family background as one among many Jews who got past the official fences of Spanish legalism that sought to keep the Indies colonies free of judaizing corruption. He only returns to this topic after he has diverted to later waves of migration, and hints that some Ashkenazi Jews may have interacted with Hispanic CryptoJews in the nineteenth century. At that point, he argues that all knowledge of previous Judaic identity was painfully and fragmentarily passed on; only after the 1800s could there have been outside influence from “Anglo” Jews. Vigil then says something surprising. “In other words, in my view,” he says, and notice how he has this double hesitation, indicating he is not following any written sources here, “Sephardic Jewish influences may have affected Hispano customs and cultures, despite suppression by the Inquisition” (Remnants, p. 169). The whole of the Spanish settler society has been, in his understanding, transformed by the Sephardic presence. Rather than the Catholic-Spanish and Mexican-Indian culture overwhelming the few remnants of Jewish conversos to the point where virtually no intellectual heritage remains and only the vaguest of nostalgic attachment to customs is left and that without understanding, Vigil would have Hispanic society itself as the signifying monument of prior Jewish civilization. He goes on to explain in his own way, once again his hesitations and non-sequiturs hints at the repressed connections he cannot bring himself to make. The tensions in the statement begin with the ambiguities of the opening word “we”, and that reminds us that one of the key definitions of a myth is “what everyone says or knows”: “We know that Sephardim secretly practiced their rituals, even though they were formally forbidden.” Here the same proviso has to be given to “formally” as we indicated, with the strength of Vigil’s unstated argument, about the strictness of Spanish bureaucratic controls over immigration to the Indies. Of these same secret customs, he claims, “They were passed on to their descendants without explanation.” But is there any evidence of that? It is clear from other sources, that some explanations were given, if not to all members of a family, then at least to one or two. I.S. Révah insists in his scholarly survey of the inquisitorial records that Crypto-Judaism was much more of a family affair than a matter of individuals,45 and this even when occasionally, by circumstances, one generation 45

I. S. Révah, Antonio Enriquez Gomez: un écrivain marrane (v. 1600–1663), ed. Carston L. Wilke (Chandeigne: Peninsules, 2003).

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might have had to be passed over to ensure the safety of the family. Vigil goes on then to speculate: “Later, other Hispanos could have emulated, picked up the same customs” (Remnants, p. 169). How and why? Is this a matter of cultural contagion, with the Jewish customs more powerful, insidious or attractive than Spanish, Mexican or Pueblo practices? How would others see these Marrano activities, unless there was inter-marriage, or servants were spying, or small children playing with one another inadvertently passed on the customs as forms of a game? Or, and this we have to speculate in a way that only the last section of this essay can begin to explain and prove: unless in the absence of formal ecclesiastical services and pastoral care, most of the Hispanic community turned to the confraternity of Penitentes — as they seem to have done whenever the Spanish clergy retreated or sought to repress local customs — and these brotherhoods were sometimes dominated by Crypto-Jews, and their rituals, prayers, and attitudes, whether understood as such or not, were impregnated with judaizing tendencies and relics of the forgotten and suppressed old faith.46 Only many pages later in his lengthy personal witness to Gloria Golden does Dr. Maurilio Vigil return to the subject of the Penitentes and his father’s participation in it. This forms one of two detailed accounts of the brotherhood in this collection of interviews, and thus allows us to develop the picture of what the members did as Crypto-Jews or Marranos in this very Catholic and yet also suspected lay organization. According to Vigil, after the whole family had moved to Las Vegas, his father would return to the Pecos chapter of the Hermandad, especially during the season of Lent. “He wanted to make sure there were enough people to participate in the ceremonies.” Then he describes what went on, weaving in and out of particulars to make generalizations, and, we may assume, interlacing things he learned from his father with what he read in books in the course of his archival research and, from time to time, attempting to interpret the activities of the institution in the light of his current understanding: They would spend all day Sunday there. They would call each other brothers, hermanos. There were several hundred chapters of the Penitentes. Each chapter had its common terms used for all the moradas. The Penitentes were widespread in New Mexico and in southern Colorado. There are basic similarities and some differences.47

He then intersperses historical data, but without a clear chronological order: In the 1920s there was an effort on their part to organize into a formal hierarchal order. Archbishop Lamy, who came to New Mexico approximately in 1850, was very critical of the Penitentes and disavowed them. He attacked their practices, 46

47

For an example of some of the alabados or hymns sung by the Penitentes, see Dan Paulos, “Santeros: The Saint-Makers” at http://www.nmia.com/~paulos/santos. Golden, Remnants, p. 171.

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flagellation and torture people would undergo in their worship rituals. He said this was against the Catholic religion. The Penitentes then went underground.

It may be assumed that before the 1920s there was no clear hierarchical structure to the brotherhood, but also, contrary to what Vigil says, that it was underground long before Jean-Baptiste Lamy arrived, or at least in many of its rituals and prayers.48 Like the other interviewees’ testimony, the development of the Penitentes and the survival of the Marranos are unclear phenomena, the memories of their parents and other family members condensing and confusing specific historical events into a vague “past” that has few date-markers. But Dr. Vigil attempts to impose some sort of chronological structure, working both from his memory of his father’s memories and from books which by and large ignore the Crypto-Jewish presence in the history of the brotherhood: The turning point in the development of the Penitentes seems to be Bishop Lamy’s efforts to reassert ecclesiastical control over the region and especially to impose his own notions of French orthodoxy: Lamy wanted to change everything and caused resentment. There was much friction between him and the native clergy He ended up excommunicating some of the most prominent priests. The Spanish priests pretty much tolerated the Penitentes.49

By “native clergy” it is not clear what Vigil means since at the time of his appointment as bishop, most of the Spanish priests and friars — who had been few enough in numbers at the best of times — had left for Mexico and the Penitentes were run by the lay members themselves. A small number of the Spanish-Mexican hierarchy remained and were opposed both by Lamy and by the general population of mostly Protestant Americans.50 To say that they tolerated the brotherhood, though, is an exaggeration; it might be better to think that they had no control over what went on in outlying districts where the Penitentes were most active and only after the assertion of American sovereignty might these clerics see in the secret brotherhood some sort of bastion of the old Hispanic ways. 48

49 50

The sober, skeptical view of the historical development of the movement as an institution may be seen in Michael P. Carroll, The Penitente Brotherhood: Patriarchy and HispanoCatholicism in New Mexico (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Golden, Remnants, p. 171. Much of what has been written about Archbishop Lamy is taken up with trying to separate the historical reality from the version of the man and his activities in Willa Cather’s novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. As there is little said in the fiction about the Penitentes — other than a few snide derogatory remarks — it is best to leave aside such discussions here.

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Then Vigil turns to the affairs of the morada or small adobe chapter-house and its local group of adherents: The morada was usually outside the village. They would call themselves, for example, the Morada of San José, meaning the chapter of San José. Although the name of the chapel itself was also morada, my father belonged to the Morada of Pecos. Father knew of a morada outside of town in Sheridan. I asked him why he didn’t go to that one. He would go instead to Pecos because he didn’t like that one. He felt at home in his chapter. His relatives were part of that chapter. When he died, we took him back there. There performed a velorio (wake) and rosary for him as part of the burial ceremony. (Remnants, p. 171)

Once again the statements here are not quite coordinated and raise many more questions than they seem to answer. There are many reasons why his father would prefer the Pecos chapter to the morada near Sheridan, such as his familiarity with old friends, a sense of loyalty to place, or a penchant for some customs as opposed to others. If this last reason is strongest as a possibility, without denying completely the first two, could the customs he preferred be closer to the Crypto-Jewish traditions Vigil and other of Gloria Golden’s informants claim were preserved in some secret form over four hundred years? Vigil says in his testimony that there were other secret societies, some religious and some secular, which also passed on knowledge that was not the same as that kind of education which the only two formal sources seemed to offer, the Church and the military. He instances the Masons and the Society of St. Joseph, this last being one considered by the Catholic authorities and set up especially about 1873 to oppose the Free Masons and, no less, the Penitentes. The brotherhood and the fellowship both represented subversive and unruly elements which the Church, not least Bishop Lamy, sought to stamp out. It is in this context that Vigil speaks out directly to Gloria Golden: That’s kind of related to what you are talking about, the church telling people not to practice Jewish customs. The higher-up clergy, priests and bishops, may have suspected that there were some customs practiced by the church, or some influences that the Masons were trying to prevail upon the Hispanic population. They viewed the Society of St. Joseph as being helpful to prevent that.51

Note the confusion in Vigil’s remarks here as he responds to what were probably leading-questions by his interviewer. The connection is made, or at least the analogy drawn to secret Jewish customs. But the specific case has to do with the Masons, not the Penitentes. Although there is much that could be said about the attraction of Jews to the Masons in the eighteenth and 51

Golden, Remnants, p. 172

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nineteenth centuries as a somewhat protected, tolerant social space for private and commercial encounters between Jews and Christians,52 this is not at issue here; rather, we must wonder whether Vigil — or his father — is putting the Fraternal Order of Free Masons in the place where the brotherhood of Penitentes belongs. For he mentions, rather offhandedly, that his family avoided attending church services, his mother lit Friday night candles, and there are “Est[h]ers” in his family, and then suddenly he comes to his description of the activity of the moradas. What he outlines in this statement is very much, at first blush, the kind of service organization that replaced the outgoing structure of the Spanish Church, with some worship services conducted by the lay members of the brotherhood.53 These charitable good works and prayer meetings belong to what we saw Samora and Simon listing as part of their diluted version of the Penitentes as a form of popular Hispanic religion. There is no attempt here to indicate what the “bad” things were about the organization that made the Church so hostile and the Anglo community shocked. These shocking things are only hinted at in the comments of a woman named Amalia Sánchez who calls herself Molly. While her paternal grandfather whom she considered doing “a Jewish thing” by avoiding the Penitentes, My other grandfather, on my mother’s side, was a Penitente. I have one of his little books. The prayers were so strange and didn’t resemble Catholicism. The majority of the people here were Penitentes. There were moradas in every little village. It was a secret society. Even we were not permitted in it. The men were real secretive. They would eat and pray in the moradas. They would stay at night and pray. They slept there. They didn’t work. Then they would leave and go up into the mountains and do sacrificial things. They also wore white outfits. I don’t know why they wore them. They would sacrifice themselves, flagellation. A lot of it was on their knees, crawling on their knees, up in the mountains, in hiding.54

This has all the hesitations and non-sequiturs that signal a struggle of the repressed to come to light. The attempt is only partially successful. The passage opens with a contradiction that the grandfather who avoided the brotherhood was behaving in a Jewish way, while the one who was an active member was also part of a secretive Judaizing group. If the prayers did not seem Catholic to her, she doesn’t tell us why; and we may have to consider that they were heretical in a specific way, and this may have included — though hardly exclusively — remnants of Jewish liturgy. In the morada things seem 52

53 54

Luc Nefontaine and Jean-Philippe Schreiber, Judaïsme et franc-maçonnerie : historie d’une fraternité (Paris : Albin Michel, 2000). Golden, Remnants, p. 173. Ibid, p. 185.

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to have been done that were secretive, heretical and perhaps Judaic, as well as manifesting other Mexican and Indian customs accreted into the brotherhood since its inception in the New World in the late sixteenth century. As a child and a female, Molly was not made privy to the activities inside the morada and certainly not up in the mountains where the bloodiest ritual self-flagellations were performed. On the surface all this hearkens back to Christian rituals in Europe and may have mixed with shamanistic violence learned from the Aztec and Pueblo nations. Yet below the surface, there is a sense that what is performed has been created partly to recall Jewish customs, such as circumcision, and to reconfigure Catholic penitential acts to serve psychological purposes by men who need to punish themselves both for being Christian and for being Jewish at the same time. In Teodoro Real’s testimony, though, there is a more active role for women in the Penitentes movement, at least in the modern version his family belonged to. In this version, the morada seems to be virtually a synagogue, with a women’s section and sisterhood association. I participated with Grandma Anaya (maternal side) in the Penitentes house of worship. The women wore shawls over their heads. The Prandi [paternal] side didn’t believe in the Penitentes. The men avoided it. However, even if you weren’t a member of the Penitentes, the people participated in their processions on Good Friday.55

But it is best to stop at this point to step back and create some other contexts into which we can assess the data we have accumulated so far. Enough should have been laid out to make clear that the Penitentes are nobody’s fools, fully aware of their uniqueness within Catholic history and proud of their ancestors’ abilities to survive persecution and opprobrium; and that there is a problem to be solved — a case to be answered — in the claims by men and women who call themselves children of anousim and who recall family participation in the Penitentes going back into the mid-seventeenth century, no matter what the brothers may have called themselves or how formally or legally they were constituted and recognized by Church and State. This compounds our task: how to explain the way in which two different groups of people, with very different cultural memories, both in need of maintaining secrecy, functioned together on the moradas. Did they know each other as such? Were their practices and beliefs mutually intelligible? Or was it all just “parallel play” in the sandbox of history?

55

Golden, Remnants, p. 208.

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SIMULATION AND DISSIMULATION IN EUROPE DURING THE PERIOD OF THE BAROQUE Dissimulated action is prescribed to princes as a virtue grounded on theological and political right, since it establishes State secrets, thus reproducing divine action based on mysterious designs. The defensive function of this resource is also transplanted to the civil sphere by means of the discreet [formula] put forth by Baltasar Gracián, but with this ingenious combination of the dissimulation and ostentation.56 In one early trial, the defendant was asked if he was presently a Jew or a Christian, to which he replied: “Though I live as a Jew internally, externally I am named with the Christian (crossed out) name of Tristano de Costa.” Asked whether this was a Jewish or a Christian name, he responded, “When my father gave me this name, he said [it was] because [it would] be so much better that he called me this name. Warned that he must answer the question of whether he was a Jew or a Christian, he stated, “I do not do the actions of a Christian.”57

We have to be careful, when dealing with the question of how and why secret Jews of all fuzzy varieties are to be found lurking in the shadows of the small Hispanic communities of the southwestern United States, not to think that simulation and dissimulation were rare phenomena in the late Renaissance and Reformation/Counter-Reformation period. If anything, it has to be said emphatically, these features of individual personality, group identity, and cultural style were prominent and give their name to the extended period itself, namely, the Baroque. To speak of these phenomena, and all their accoutrements, adornments, and underpinnings as defining the European transition from medieval certainties (the Latin-Christian synthesis in general) through the ordeals of rebirth and reconfiguration of primary institutions and institutionalized beliefs would be an understatement. And yet — because there has to be such hesitation, backtracking and modification of bald statements — the secret Jews, like the Penitentes, exist in the margins, between the lines, and occluded by shadows of history and the blinding light of received opinion. In this second half of the Chapter Two, then, our focus shifts momentarily away from the Penitentes in the southwestern United States and returns to 56 57

Missio, “A dissimulação como virtude” 121. Inquisition record cited in Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2005) p. 122.

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Europe, but not only to Iberia, where the various forms of secret and suspected Jews played cat and mouse games with the Inquisition. Instead, for the next several pages, we will look at Christian epic poets and the world of Baroque art in which they lived and worked. By doing so, we will gain a different, a larger perspective on the techniques and effects of simulation and dissimulation. This turning of our attention to poets and artists of the seventeenth century (or occasionally some other period) is something we will have to do from time to time, to gain balance, to shift our vantage point, and to place the microhistorical concerns of the confused souls in the old northern fringes of Mexico in a larger cultural and psychological context. Studies of the three main epic poets of Italy during the Renaissance, Boiardo,58 Arisoto59 and Tasso,60 have shown increasingly in the last quarter of a century the centrality of these characteristics both as stylistic features of their poetry and also as a cultural categories in their time and place. One of the key scholars in this field, Sergio Zatti61 makes this set of phenomena central to his project. For each of the epic poets, both the form of the poetic style itself and the flexibility of the fantastic version of reality that this genre requires, becomes a way of articulating — and constructing — new kinds of individuality. But there is more to it than individuality in the modern sense of self-construction. The connection of these poets to our topic is oblique but not obscure. The historical setting gives one hint, in that all three of these poets were citizens of Ferrara, a city under the rule of the d’Este family, known for their welcome and support of Jews, including those refugees from the Expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the forced conversions in Portugal four years later.62 Though tolerance or liberalism in the modern sense did not prevail in the city and medieval prejudices against Jews and Judaism can be found in the art produced for court and church, 58

59

60

61

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Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato, trans. Charles Stanley Ross (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For the Italian text, see Ludovico Ariosto, Opere, ed. Adriano Seroni (Milan: U. Mrsia, n.d. [?1964], Introduzione,” pp. ix–xxiii, ”Orlando Furioso,” pp. 5–1001. For a contemporary prose translation into English, see Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Guido Waldman (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press) (1974, 1983). For a modern verse translation, see Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando): A Romantic Epic, 2 vol., trans. Barbara Reynolds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975–1977). Torquato Tasso, La Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Ludovico Magugliani (Milan: Rizzoli, 1950), “Nota” pp. 5–8. Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered/Gerusalemme liberata, ed. and trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), Introduction,” pp. 1–14. Sergio Zatti. The Quest for Epic from Ariosto to Tasso. Introduction by Albert Russell Ascoli., ed., Dennis Looney, trans. by Sally Hill with Dennis Looney (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2006). Dolores J. Sloan, “Ferrara: Spiritual Haven for Conversos” HaLapid (Spring 1999) available online at http://www.cryptojews.com/ferrara. (Seen 30/06/2008)

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however, does not justify historians who emphasize these anti-Jewish themes and images at the expense of the other evidence — the evidence of intellectual and cultural interactions between elites in the city. Indeed, Samuel Usque in the Consolation of Israel speaks of Ferrara as the safest refuge for Jews in Italy, at least in his own time.63 Albert da Vidas sums up the situation: Important Sephardi commercial houses, through the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in Ferrara were able to link the European markets with those in the Ottoman Empire and bring a welcome prosperity to the city during most of the 16th century. The most important of those international traders was Don Samuel Abravanel, recently expelled by the Spaniards from Naples, who with his wife Benevenida, made their house the focus of an intellectual revival in the city, where both Jewish and Christian writers, philosophers, artists and musicians were able to continue the Renaissance.64

The sustained presence of Jews in Ferrara, their commercial and intellectual success in the d’Este or Estensi family’s realm, and the lack of popular uprisings against them all suggest an atmosphere in which, if social contacts were not regular or even sporadic, then at least access to books and ideas was possible.65 According to Andrée Aelion Brooks, In Ferrara, the previous hundred years or so had witnessed the arrival of a university, approved by the pope in 1391, that attracted some of the greatest thinkers and innovators of the Renaissance. Poets and painters followed. Supported by a line of Este rulers, the miniature state soon became identified with a liberal and humanistic outlook.66

Ercole I, for instance, held conversations and played games with leaders of the Jewish community.67 His connections through Naples to the court of Aragon bring in another aspect of cultural influence that the city shared with the 63

64 65

66 67

“The situation changed in 1581, when Alfonso II under pressure from Pope Gregiory XIII jailed a few anousim and and even worse sent three of them to Rome where they were murdered by the Papacy. By the time of Alfonso’s death in 1597, the Papacy took over Ferrara, leaving to another branch of the House of Este the Duchies of Moewena and Reggio. For the Sephardis and other Jews of Ferrara that was the end of the secure refuge”: Albert de Vidas, “1880”, Erensia Sefardi 15:1 (Winter 2007) 5. De Vidas, “1880”, 4. For a good background on the intellectual and social life of Jews in Ferrara, see Andrée Aelion Brooks, The Woman who Defied Kings: The Life and Times of Doña Gracia Nasi — A Jewish Leader During the Renaissance (St. Paul, MI: Paragon House, 2003), pp. 148, 149, etc. Brooks, The Woman who Defied Kings, p. 238. C. Thomas Ault, “The Passion of Christ and Ritual Performances in Fifteenth-Century Ferrara” Baylor Journal of Theatre and Performance 3:2 (2006) online at http://www. baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/50004.pdf (Seen 1 July 2008)

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educated conversos who arrived from Spain. As Ault puts it, “Evidently, Ercole brought the aesthetic culture and courtly urbanity he had learned at Naples to Ferrara.”68 This same aesthetic culture and courtly urbanity, along with intellectual acumen and worldly wisdom, marked the likes of Beatriz de Luna (Doña Gracia Nasi), Samuel and Benevenida Abravanel, Amatus Lusitanus, Samuel Usque and dozens of other men and women.69 If the Duke could enjoy speaking with these highly cultured and elegant Spanish Jews, why not other courtiers?70 But there is also the nature of the subject these three epic poets chose. Boiardo and Ariosto developed the characters and situation of the Chanson de Roland, in which the hero Roland (in Italian Orlando) fights against the Muslim invaders to save Charlemagne’s France and the Christian Empire he founded. In this defence of western Latin civilization, despite the seemingly central themes of chivalry, love and feudal loyalty, the poets stress the inherent values of their religion, and this defense resonates with Old Testament heroism and faith. For his part, Tasso was writing the Gerusalemme Liberata between 1570 and 1575, and it circulated in manuscript until 1579, but then unauthorized versions started to appear in print, so that the poet had to take charge of an authorized version in 1581. It represents a view, primarily in Ferrara, but elsewhere in Western Europe as well, of the world as seen from a Christian perspective as it confronts the increasing dangers of Islam moving once more into the heart of the Continent. Though there is little that can be seen that deals with the Jews as mediating between the Church and the Crescent, nevertheless Tasso, by seeing the strength of Christendom turning on its ability to liberate the Holy City of Jerusalem, he marks a position that increasingly Jews will have in the messianic and practical ideals over the next century. As Menasseh ben Israel will point out in the heady, expectant days approaching 1660 — that mystical assumed date of messianic coming — everything depends on the Jews fulfilling their historical destiny.71 Though the expectations go awry, misfired by the false claims of Shabbatai Tzvi and his prophet Nathan of Gaza, there is a profound new sense of both disappointments and disillusionment, on the one hand, especially among Jews of the West who turn more to political and commercial programmes of self68 69 70

71

Ault, “The Passion of Christ” 87. Sloan, “Spiritual Haven.” Compare Ercole I’s friendships with those of Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) with his Italian Jewish teachers and mentors in Florence about the same time; “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Pico_della_Mirandola. (Viewed 12/06/2008) See M. Hadas-Lebel and H. Méchoulan, “Consquences theologiques et politiques de l’ésperance messianique, xvie–xviie siècles” in Menasseh Ben Israel, La pierre glorieuse de Nabuchodnosor, or La find de l’histoire au xviie siècle, trans. H. Knafou (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2007) pp. 33–72.

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renewal; and, on the other, a sense of the need for the new Protestant states, and some Catholic nations outside of Iberia, particularly France, to give protection and support to the Jews. However, it may have been that a half century before, during the 1590s, when the first Hispanic settlers trekked north to the regions of northern New Spain, into a virtual desert, peopled by wild and hostile “savages,” the imaginations of these people, many of them New Christians, were fired by hopes of re-enacting the Exodus and, thereby, of hastening the messianic end of times. If this were a strong motivation, and not some practical search for an outof-the-way but commercially fruitful place to hide away from persecutions in the south, then the scoffers who reject the possibility of a New Christian presence that was able to pass on its memories and its identity cannot be sustained. Michael P. Carroll points out two key factors that skeptics find compelling: (1) the Inquisition deputized the Franciscans to act for them in hunting down heretics, not least judaizers, and Franciscans were the dominant religious and state power in the region; and (2) to anyone who was looking for a comfortable or tempting business opportunity through mining, farming or trading, “colonial New Mexico would have been an unappealing destination” and, in fact, there was a “near-complete absence of mercantile activity.”72 In the words of R. Frank, “there was little mercantile activity in New Mexico prior to 1750.”73 The riposte to these objections, while given throughout this book, more precisely would be: first, that, even as Carroll indicates,74 the geographical structure of settlements were not centralized but scattered, with friars being few in number and never able to impose any sustained or continuous monitoring of people’s behaviors or beliefs. This kind of factual, historical evidence, however, can do no more than suggest a situation as problematic as the one set up by the skeptics. The second riposte, putting aside even further a proverbial Spanish tendency to ignore regulations and allow infractions to be accommodated with bribes and friendly favors — obdedezco per no cumplo (“I accept your orders, but won’t actually carry them out”)75 — the kind of people about whom we are talking may very well have had these ulterior motives we are discussing, such as some combination of 72

73

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“Michael P. Carroll, “The Debate over a Crypto-Jewish Presence in New Mexico: The Role of Ethnographic Allegory and Orientalism” Sociology of Religion (2/22/2002) online at Highbeam Encyclopedia (2008) file:///E:/Encyclopedia-OnlineDictionary (Read 8/1/08). R. Frank, “Economic Growth and the Creation of the Vecino Homeland in New Mexico, 1780–1820” Revista de Indies 556 (208) 743–782 cited in Carroll, “The Debate over a Crypto-Jewish Presence.” Carroll cites and paraphrases Fray Juan Augustin de Morfi whose Account of the Disorders in New Mexico,1778 has been edited by M. Simmons (Albuquerque, NM: Historical Society of New Mexico, 1977) p. 12. John W. Wertheimer, “Gloria’s Story: Adulterous Concubinage and the law in TwentiethCentury Guatamala” Law and History Review 24:2 (Summer, 2006).

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(a) mystical fervor and thus a desire to wander forty years in the desert in the hope of coming to a new Sinai, (b) cynical despondency and disgust with civilization itself and even any organized religion, whether Christian or Jewish, leading to an intense wish to “get away from it all”; and then one of several very different kinds of Jewish hope, (i) one that would to re-establish the very kind of Judaism that was lost in Iberia during the Maimonidean Controversies, and hence was really impossible to conceive without the learned rabbis, the full range of sacred books, and the commitment of sufficient people to make it work. (ii) Another might have been like the one conceived in a formal way later by Menasseh Ben Israel and a few other returned New Christians living in Protestant cities like Amsterdam, would be a linkage to messianic Christians in the establishment of a Hebrew state once again, if not in the Land of Israel because of the might of the Turkish Islamic occupation then somewhere else such as Dutch-Brazil, Chile or northern Mexico. (iii) Still later, as we see in the writings of Elijah Benamozegh, an idealized Jewish leadership for a Noachic kingdom, wherein non-Jews prepare to live in a state set up according to a biblical Law in accord with Hebrew citizens who cooperate by mediating with the divine powers on behalf of all humanity.76 (iv) Lastly, and perhaps least fantastically of all, although still built on misplaced assumptions, there would be a Portuguese-Jewish nation that includes all close and distant members of those families that chose to ally with Catholic elites, convert selected members, and work towards a modern and tolerant state; this time, rather than spreading throughout the extent of the commercial empires of Iberia, there would be an ingathering of a small and select remnant. We see vague attempts in projects to colonize small, out-ofthe-way islands like Tobago that foundered due to disease that cut down the small band of travelers77 or São Tomé where after the fallen in sugar prices, raids by French, English and Dutch pirates and other catastrophes, the naçio moved almost en masse to Brazil.78 These options at the very most, if they ever existed at all, were mirages. The persons involved in the enterprise were more than ever praying for a miracle — 76

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Elijah Benamozegh, Israel and Humanity, trans. Maxwell Luria (New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1995). See the discussion of Miguel de Barrios alias Daniel Levi in my Masks in the Mirror, Chapter 4, pp. 113–139. See the data in bibliography for my essays on the Children of São Tomé:

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what else could they do? — if not in their life time, then soon enough, in God’s own good time. But this is perhaps nothing but a pious speculation. What we can do right now is follow the literary twists and turns of the great epic poets of the Italian Renaissance who lived, all three, under the generous and relatively tolerant patronage of the Dukes of Este. Though this city was no paradise for Jews, it was often and in relative terms a heaven of civic protection and support, and it was particularly a refuge for Sephardim escaping the persecutions in Spain and the Spanish territories in Italy. Brooks sums the situation up: There was certainly no Jewish ghetto in Ferrara. Rather, Jewish intellectuals — printers, poets, writers, engineers, medical researchers and bankers — worked alongside everyone else. Jews held faculty positions at its university . . . With ten synagogues in lively operation, there was no more hospitable place for Jews and conversos in all of Italy.79

Does any of this unusual tolerance and inter-mixing between Jews and Christians reveal itself in the epic poems of Boiardo, Arisosto and Tasso? Should we expect there to be the kind of secret, coded philo-Judaic themes that have recently been suggested can be found in the Sistine Chapel where Michelangelo vented his anti-papal feelings in the very structures of his magnificently crafted paintings of sacred Christian doctrine? In fact, might there be, to anticipate our later discussions of the way Marranos explored and expiated their feelings of guilt through the most Catholic of all penitential exercises, a sense in which Renaissance artists — painters, poets, dramatists, architects — used the licit techniques of Baroque anamorphoses to hide their radical critique of all the powers that were operative around them? Some serious scholars see this as possible, without going as far as those who postulate a systematic subversion of established conventions and values. For instance, Dana Katz remarks on the prevalence of viciously anti-Jewish iconography in the churches and public buildings of most Italian cities of the time, even when the rulers of these same places did not permit the kind of anti-Jewish persecutions typical of more northern states. Thus, at the very least, we should be prepared to see a discontinuity between religious art and social or political reality; but we might go further to suggest that there is a large area of ambiguity between doctrinal statements and images of Catholic anti-Judaism and the more genial relationships between artists, writers, and other professional intellectuals. This region of the ambiguous could include comic narratives, plays and epic poems. These imaginative constructs, somewhat analogous to the paintings and frescos of Jews being tortured and expelled that provided a symbolic counterpart 79

Brooks, The Woman who Defied Kings, p. 239.

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to the more tolerant treatment in northern cities like Ferrara,80 actually project a very different kind of symbolic dream-world; though partly based on anxieties in Christendom about the encroachments of Islamic Turkey into the heart of the Continent again, they also begin to express hopes for a messianic victory that would cleanse the land of tyrannical oppression by ecclesiastical and political forces and would lead Europe back, somehow or other, to a more purified and “Judaic” Christianity. For Ariosto the seemingly endless intricacies of the entrelacement so typical of medieval and later romances, with its weaving together of several plotlines and thematic commentaries, does more than provide an opportunity for suspense, contrasting moods, and category over-lapping; they also open up possibilities of exposing the dynamic complexities of human psychology both at the level of individual personality in times of stress (the madness of Orlando’s love operating in concert rather than a mere symbol of religious and national insanity) and group interactions, as clusters of knights and ladies weave their stories and loyalties in and around one another. Cavallo, basing her argument on A. Bartlett Giamatti’s studies, claims Arisoto’s poetry reveals, “The gradual deepening of man’s sense of bewilderment and despair as he attempts to reconcile the values of the past with the implications of the present and future.”81 What emerges, Cavallo explains is “a new attitude of cynical resignation to human depravity.”82 Such a change, for whatever reasons there may lie in the poet’s own sub-consciousness and the pressures in the society of the Este court, also typify the kind of transformed sensibilities that mark the breakdown of early Renaissance optimism and the confrontation with the dark side of the changes brought about by innovations and the resistance to such progressive ideas — negative factors that plague the mentality of the small groups of individuals and families we are concerned with. Thus in this entrelacement, mentioned by Zatti, we can begin to see the analogy to the attempts by secret Jews to knot themselves into the hegemonic Christian community and yet maintain, in their separate threads, a sense of peculiar historical origins and continuing moral values. In the Renaissance epics, the romantic love-stories are bound up with historical questions of the integrity, defense and definition of Europe itself, sometimes as a matrix into which only the colors of Christendom are allowable, and sometimes, though more rarely, the fabric of social and spiritual reality allows for textures of otherness, Muslim and Jewish — and even, in a very cautious and subversive manner, the counter-movements to Catholicism, 80

81 82

Dana E. Katz, The Jew in the Art of the Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Cited in Cavallo, The Romance Epics, p. 120 from Giametti’s Exile and Change, p. 138. Cavallo, The Romance Epics, p. 121.

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including pagan reflexes and secular foreshadowing. For Tasso, shifting forward from the base narrative of Charlemagne’s defense of Christendom from the invading Islamic-Arab armies to the effort of Christian Europe to protect the Holy Land and secure the pilgrimage and trade routes to and from the Middle East, also stresses the contrast between the harshness of contemporary politics and the anxieties of emotionally charged romantic fantasies. As in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso the constant delays and deferrals indicate a deep failure among Christian knights and nations to see clearly the present dangers to the safety and viability of their civilization, so in Tasso’s Gerusalama Liberata the old chivalric ideals become snags to the accomplishment of political, military and social acts; and in both instances, though in different ways, reveal the need for a new kind of Christian psychology that is appropriate for the kind of urban civilization being created by the Renaissance. In this way, more than Boiardo, Ariosto takes the romantic epic form out of its medieval carapace of moral paradigms and magical adventures and allows it to form itself into a space where personal feelings, opinions and thoughts can be observed and evaluated in action. Time and space tend to be revalorized and given substance as the limits of human performance. If the great Christian and Muslim heroes and heroines are still caught up in forces that defer the resolution to their inner conflicts, that failure to achieve closure is seen less as part of a vast and endless romantic comedy and more as a tragic weakness in them as individuals — but more the inner weakness of the very idealized values they believe they are fighting for. As Zatti puts it, . . . the inchista (as both ‘quest’ and ’inquiry’) represents the intellectual equivalent of the predatory movement of his knights: an instrument for the appropriation of, and thus mastery over, a shifting and multifaceted reality.83

In other words, “The ancient movement of the quête is intellectualized and gradually assumes ethical and epistemological dimensions.”84 This quest — the very heart of the ancient generic plot of all romance epics — “turns back and reexamines itself.”85 “This is a quest,” the author claims, “that does not reject the material movements and the attitudes of the chivalric quête but turns them towards the possession of cognitive truths.”86 In the process, we might add, the epic follows a similar path to the Marranesque peoples who have to discover who and what they are in the very same moment of crisis — usually when arrested, subjected to torture, or condemned to the stake by the Inquisition — in which their freedom 83 84 85 86

Zatti. The Quest for Epic from Ariosto to Tasso, p. 39. Ibid, p. 44. Ibid, p. 47. Ibid, p. 51.

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to express that identity in the world is eclipsed, and they and their beliefs are cast into the shadows of a history that denies them a legitimate role. What Zatti shows, then, is how Ariosto can pour new wine out of an old jug, and move much more towards a novelistic inward turn of narrative than almost any other author trying to work within the old medieval genres. It is because of this moreover that Cervantes can create his Don Quixote as the first modern novel, and fuzzy Jews create the very mannerisms of modernity. But whereas the Castilian narrative deepens the powers of the prose romance, the Italian poet expands the range of intellectual explorations possible within the idealized frames of the verse epic. Like Erasmus, Ariosto makes his compromises in an age that is turning away from compromise — and descending into the labyrinthine hell of the Wars of Religion — and so for a moment, out of his own private anguish, he stages a powerful, uplifting tragedy: The case of the investigatory quest, analysed as an exemplary paradigm of this method, demonstrated how the expressive subtly of Ariosto’s language allows him to operate unabashedly on both the narrative level of the search for Angelica and that of the search for the truth about the nature of women.”87

In this search for truth — about women, about men, about humanity — Ariosto revalorizes the relationship between poet-narrator, reader-inquest, and characters who live nominally in the world and time of Charlemagne but more existentially in the contemporary world of the Renaissance. The narrator is also a reader, interpreting and recreating the putative text of Turpin, the source of the traditions of Charlemagne and Roland, thus forcing the reader of this poem to see more and other than the conventions of chanson de geste, early epic romances, and the courtly ideals that suddenly seem to run out of steam in late fifteenth-century Italy. Rather than the authoritative/fictive/mythical authority, Turpin becomes for Ariosto the agent who “unmask[s] the rules of the literary device through the brilliant linking of two roles traditionally attributed to him (authorizing and directing the action).”88 In this way, the knightly Bishop Turpin ceases to be a trustworthy source of truth and becomes, instead, as the reader is forced to engage in a dialogue to test and tease out of him more than his traditional text seems to offer, a secret director of a new kind of dialogue between reader and text, author and skeptical authority vested in the reader’s own experience. Like the New Christians who went to settle in the northernmost regions of New Spain in the years following the Conquest, Ariosto does not break completely with traditions and conventions: but whereas they help to create the Penitentes tradition, he recreates the cantari tradition, “where the constant presupposition of material authenticated by the 87 88

Zatti, The Quest for Epic, pp. 57–48. Ibid, p. 70.

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sources then re-elaborated by the narrator is like a warp of weaving over the pre-existent weft.”89 In more detail, “[t]hat tradition includes a given passage — even though it may not be essential to the narrative, and despite its provocative nature — only because Turpin included it in his tale.” Because of this, ironically — with an irony that is neither gratuitous sarcasm nor cutting satire — the text of Orlando Furioso begins to engage the reader in a quête for the truth that must not and cannot be articulated in the only language available for it, and hence to be driven ever deeper into the silence and invisibility of private, individual experience. “The cunning devices of the cantari system,” Zatti says, “far from allowing Ariosto to present himself as a guarantor of fidelity to a source, or to perpetuate the rite of appealing to historical truths, serve instead to divulge the fictionality of the whole operation.” In these words supposedly limited only to a literary phenomenon, we catch necessary hints for comprehending the more elusive tracks of a socio-cultural contraption grinding away on the murky road to oblivion in a far and confusing desert. Only in a culture emerging from the long, dark sleep of obeisance to institutional authority — and where “reason” means bending beneath the dead weight of tradition — can the achievement of Ariosto be fully appreciated. By reducing the figure of irony to its ground zero, he ensures that all literature and not just a single one of its texts, that the whole text and not just a single section of it, must be read with ‘that same belief that is given to fictions and fables.’90 It is this, Zatti points out, that made, of all readers, Galileo approve of Ariosto’s “joking compromise (where the fantastic parts are said to coexist and intermingle.”91 By claiming Turpin’s authority as his own, that is, wearing as his authorial mask a supposedly real historical author who was also involved in the action of the fictive poem, and at the same time as he disestablishes the immediate granting of authority to each author per nomine, there is a shift in perspective, along with a shift in the paradigmatic matrix upon which the epic is constructed: to include the reader and the narrator in a comic collusion against the ideal heroes and adventures — so as generate a new space with a new power of self-critical reading; a space in which, often alone, fraught with doubts, and weighed down by guilt for what he is doing, the poet-reader (for they become one in the intensity of the quête) exceed the boundaries of literature. The truth about which Ariosto creates so much irony is his awareness of depending on other texts, whether it manifests itself in the Furioso’s prestigious density of cultivated allusions and echoes or in its amiable and good-natured winking at Turpin.92 89 90 91 92

Zatti, The Quest for Epic, p. 73. Ibid, p. 73. Ibid, p. 76. Ibid, p. 93.

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It is not that every Renaissance poem is a lie and every authority ipso facto unreliable, nor that every historical act or recorded text, but that “every truth is relative because it is historically conditioned . . . ” This is a frightening realization but it is the hero who overcomes fear, not the conventionalized stick-figure who moves around in the semidarkness pretending to act on his own. Tasso, it would seem, repudiates the very tradition of romance epic that Ariosto does so much to recreate in a Renaissance mode of self-critical inwardness. Such repudiation, however, does not ignore or trample on its predecessor but engages with it in a much more respectful and fruitful way. At the same time, while seeming to eliminate himself from the genre into which Ariosto poured his own feelings and experiences, Tasso also builds his poem out of “his personal travails as a poet,”93 and what may be thought of as “objectivity” actually functions as a “moral” critique of the genre and the cultural presuppositions upon which it was reconstructed in the previous generation. Moreover, for Tasso, the prosodic and the rhetorical twists and turns of the romance become agencies of political criticism. The desis or narrative knot is a diabolical force in history and a danger to the viability of Christian civilization. Indeed, when we transfer the meaningful burden of this term from the place of courtly poetry in Renaissance Italy to the wilds of the New World and look at experiences of the men and women who trekked into the wilderness to escape the talons of the Holy Office, we find that this rhetorical figure can be fitted into the contraption of our seeing-engine. Examining closely the poet’s Discorsi dell’arte poetica, Zatti extrapolates the essential meanings of the Liberata: Goffredo, the God-emulating hero of the epic, sets out to “discharge the vow” or “untie the knot” which “is the Aristotelian desis or complication of the plot — the peripeteia or reversal, the crisis, the romance tangle that ultimately leads to the lusis of epic resolution.” For this reason, “‘[r]omance’ is then placed under the sign of Satan or, to put it more precisely, the subversive plan that Satan outlines is essentially a review of the multiple plots of the poem.”94 At the same time that the epic exposes the dangerous weaknesses in Christendom that exist because individuals and states base their loyalties on a chivalric code that is unrealistic: built on the analphabetic, mythical thinking that Faur sees as the grounds for tyranny, blinding of the world, as in Canetti’s Auto-da-fe, known earlier as Kien Catches Fire95 and before that even as “Die Blendung” (The Blinding) the name of Rubens’ painting of Samson being blinded, and thus drawing together the punitive and persecutory fires of the Inquisition with the self-deluding would-be heroics of the Nazarene 93 94 95

Zatti, The Quest for Epic, p. 101. Ibid, p. 107. The original name of Kien (= torch) was Kant after the German eighteenth-century philosopher.

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strongman. In this perspective, adherents of the Law, previously party to the berit or covenant with God and thus contractually bound to recall, interpret and pass on the principles of allegiance to the Torah and its 613 mitzvot, become entangled, discombobulated, and confused. Like the romantic heroes of Italian epic who should be defending their civilization and reclaiming sovereignty over Jerusalem, they are willfully blind to the policy of destructiveness their enemies in the Muslim camp operate by. There is also another dimension to the poem — and to life. The erotic idealism that drives the knights and ladies of Ariosto’s epic to the furor that debilitates their duty to protect Charlemagne and the Christian Empire, with all the values that it inherits from classical Greece and Rome, is embodied in the nostalgia and irrationality of the poetic structure. It is subversive not only of the military and political goals of the crusade to win back the Holy City of Jerusalem from the Saracen foes, but also a demonic “return of the repressed” — an infuriating denial of consciousness and rationality in the moral conduct of everyday affairs.96 It may be that Ariosto himself was aware of these characteristics intrinsic to the generic ideals he was caught up in when writing Orlando Furioso, so that he not only could not bring himself to complete the romantic epic itself, but put aside as a separate work the so-called Cinque canti. These five cantos indeed seem to be “a negative flip side to the main narrative” and a more deeply tragic vision of events — “the defeat of Charles, the overthrow of the Christian armies, ands the emperor’s fall into the river.”97 This gloomy version of the epic, however, does not put paid to the epic romance as a viable genre. No more so does the miscalculation by one generation who convert to Catholicism for strategic, cynical, sincere or insane reasons negate the obligations of the subsequent generation to adhere to the precepts of the Mosaic Law. It signals the direction towards which it can develop, a direction that is not pleasant but necessary if the world is to survive such misbegotten idealism, even if it means that the poet cannot bring himself to follow through with his own insight: The crisis of chivalric courtesy in the Cinque canti creates an ironic countermelody that renders the famous irony of the Furioso incongruous . . . The return to a more reassuring omniscient voice of unmaking and denunciation in the Cinque canti seems . . . to indicate a defensive choice, the choice of an author who is opting out, who no longer wants to play the game because he has lost faith in an ordered reality.98

Have the fuzzy Jews who went to New Mexico, southern Colorado, Arizona and Texas at the end of the sixteenth century lost their faith in either the imposed 96 97 98

Zatti, The Quest for Epic, p. 109. Ibid, p. 114. Ibid, p. 116.

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or adopted religion of the persecuting Church and the meaningful power of the Synagogue which could not protect them, and which had, in all events, betrayed its own traditional values by siding with Ramban against Rambam? What Ariosto and most continuations of his work cannot do, Tasso takes in hand and pushes to a new level of epic and tragic grandeur. Tasso only seems to regress to a more medieval moralism, back past Boiardo to the strict determinism of the chansons de geste. The truth is that he breaks apart the false trust in Renaissance ideals and forces the poem — its characters and its readers — to confront the harsh realities of the world that has been opened up by the new visions of post-feudalism and Reformation/Counter- Reformation. Hence it is not so much the Muslim enemy, with jihad and political fanaticism, that threaten Christendom as it is the collapse of the medieval synthesis of Church and State and the release of private passions into the public arena — machiavellian, materialistic, skeptical, cynical, mercantile and erotic. The theme of the degeneration of modern times (i.e., in what we ourselves call the Renaissance) echoes through the whole of the second canto in particular with dramatic insistence. “It is visible in the forceful argument against tyranny . . . against mercenaries . . . where Machiavellian echoes provide the backdrop for a live concern about breaking the local bonds and the feudal links of the chivalric tradition.”99 We need in no way postulate that the court poets were Jews, not even conversos, in order to recognize in them the kind of discomfort with the status quo and the received paradigms of culture around them that was characteristic of men and women who were forced by circumstances to wander. These circumstances — not least, the pursuit of the Inquisition of all social deviants — were the decisions their parents or grandparents made, but must include their own tenacity to stay alive in the midst of an extended crisis not of their own choosing, namely, loss of ancestral religious identity, entrance into an exile that was sometimes more metaphorical than geographical, and their persistent longing for a way to mend the world of appearances and adjust it to the ideals of their aesthetic dreams. In what Zatti wants to call a Freudian analysis of Tasso’s Gerusalemme, he indicates the tensions between Christendom and Islam with their different cultures, religions, and mentalities, thus leaving out of explicit concern Judaism, yet leaving open the possibility — as we are attempting to show as we supplement and extend the significance of Zatti’s study — to make it relevant for a study of Marranism and other forms of fuzzy Judaism. In this sense, Islam is a metaphor, a screen of otherness, though what it covers and what it reveals are often unclear and unsteady. Zatti goes beyond the public and historical themes to examine “the private goals” of the knights on either side of the conflict for control of Jerusalem, and thus he claims that for Tasso, while “Christians conceive of the war as 99

Zatti, The Quest for Epic, pp. 125–126.

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service and as a mission . . . the pagans understand [the conflict] as individual affirmation, motivated by different reasons for each person . . . ”100 Putting aside the problematic appropriateness of this kind of analysis as psychoanalytic, we can see that the Italian poet has a more than satirical intention in projecting into the enemy the faults of character and morality that beset the European forces. Rather than following Ariosto in exposing the dangers of private (personal ambitions, family honour, local politics) interests undermining the capacity of Charlemagne’s allies to protect the Holy Roman civilization he rules as emperor, Tasso finds the real threat to Christian Europe in the ethical weaknesses and political divisiveness of the heroic knights. As Zatti puts it in discussing a key moment in the Liberata, The relegation of the defeated to the bowels of the earth ends up seeming, beyond metaphor, like the suffocation and repression by the victorious Christian code of hedonistic and materialistic values embodied by the pagans.101

However, instead of following through in the depth-psychological implications of this statement, the critic veers towards the more external factors of his argument: Satan’s tirade against Christian imperialism thus gives us a glimpse of a missed historical opportunity — which the poetic fiction re-proposes as a present one — to subvert the dominant ethical-ideological system. It is here that its disturbing, disaggregating power lies.102 It is certainly interesting and important to encounter this ambiguity in these and other Renaissance epic romances, to read them with this finesse in regard to its philosophical and political implications — and to be prepared to see the simplistic paradigms of medieval allegory undercut by a subtler and more realistic perspective. But the modern reader also needs to be taken more deeply into the somatic and emotional issues in Ariosto’s and Tasso’s poetic visions and to wrestle with their angelic hosts; not necessarily reducing the psyches of the individual knights and national groups to essentialist (personified) forces of sexuality and infantile trauma (though these are certainly key factors to be considered among others), but discovering in them figures of a more profound malaise, one that includes the more humble and distant activities of the Marranos on the moradas in the hidden spaces of northern Mexico. For example, the key role of female knights in Ariosto and the fantastic exoticism of Tasso’s Eastern settings cry out for nuanced depth-analysis. To a certain degree, Zatti does attempt to coordinate his discussion of these two poems (and associated poems and treatises by these authors and their contemporaries) with the biographical data available about Ariosto and Tasso to show the way in 100 101 102

Zatti, The Quest for Epic, p. 140. Ibid, p. 148. Ibid.

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which they transform inherited romance and historical characters, events and themes into more personal statements about the new world that was opening all around them through scientific and philosophical breakthroughs, voyages of discovery to unexpected lands and peoples, and social changes in a postfeudal Europe. These considerations cannot be brushed aside to make room for an alternative discussion of secret Jews dispersing themselves throughout Europe and the newly discovered lands as part of an Incidentalist approach; the role of these Jews in the new Sephardic Diaspora remains too central and vital for such facile sidelining. Almost every key voyage of discovery and breakthrough in philosophical, scientific and artistic thought can be found to have Jews of one sort or another close to the foundational moment of expansion and application. If their presence has not always been noted or taken into account adequately, either because of the success of the occlusions in the project of self-protection or through bigotry and unconscious blindness on the part of scholarship, that does not absolve us today, here and now, from ignoring the basic realities. These realities in regard to the epic poets begins with their flourishing for the most part in the city of Ferrara and under the patronage of dukes wellknown for their unusually high degree of tolerance for Jews, especially the exiles from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. While we cannot easily assert a direct influence of Jewish thought on the court entertainers or a reciprocal understanding of their new circumstances through reading of the poems or participation in any of the debates raised each time one of the epics was printed and pamphlets and booklets appeared to debate the issues they raised in the city, there are manifest signs of shared concerns and attitudes. Not least of these signs can be found under the rubric of what Zatti calls “the age of ‘dissimulation.’ This period in European history truly was “the age of shadows and chiaroscuro.”103 Indeed, this may be the most important insight Zatti has to offer us. It is significant that, following the Council of Trent, the world of these Italian poets — if not all Europeans — became one in which “hidden resistance found its moral justification in the concept of prudence.”104 Prudentia or Prudence was indeed raised to the rank of a sovereign virtue by the Church of Rome, and in this period came to be associated with the somewhat more dubious virtues of reticence, silence and duplicity. As Cavallo shows, the revisers of old romantic poems, such as Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso, have a new version of this Christianized classical virtue: “Prudence . . . no longer means acting according to the dictates of reason, but rather choosing a veneer of false seeming over an unpleasant truth.”105 What used to be a positive assessment of wisdom, 103 104

105

Zatti, The Quest for Epic, p. 195. For a conventional post-Tridentine view of “prudence as the better part of patience”, see Teresa de Cartagena, “Grove of the Infirm” in Selected Writings, pp. 66–67. Cavallo, The Romance Epics, p. 121.

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now becomes a mode of “cleverness”, and “justice no longer entails combating evil, but simply proving to our neighbor (or spouse) that he is more degenerate than we are.”106 Such cynicism easily slides into Machiavellian ethics, where the end justifies the means. “The behaviour of those who exercised power and those who were constrained to defer to power often converged and mirrored one another like the pieces in a game of chess.107 It would seem here that Zatti is pointing to the two kinds of cynicism available since classical times, one which belongs to those who mask their arbitrary power behind a façade of benevolence and shared concern and one which falls to those who lack open methods of redress for their inferior status and therefore put on various ironical masks. Such masks could range from enthusiastic compliance with the status quo through resigned acceptance of a difficult situation and even to “the mask of lunacy” — whether the melancholic pose of Don Quixote the Cabellero de Triste Figura or Roland as Orlando Furioso the insane lover. But whether this kind of a tension between modes of ironic posturing can be compared to a polite game of chess with equal and opposite pieces set out formally to be moved in regular patterns is rather more questionable. It is more likely that the games played in desperation and frustration were asymmetrical and anamorphic. That the moves adopted for the game of dissimulation could include an appeal to honesty at the same time as they indicate, however subtly, extremes of desperation can be seen in Zatti’s discussion of Torquato Accestti’s 1641 treatise Della dissimulazione onesta. The purpose of this text was to find a balance between two apparently antithetical states: pretence (in the sense of the mask, veil or concealment) and virtue. This was possible . . . because between the extremes of an ignoble falsehood and a naïve and artless innocence lay a third dimension; that is, an intermediate moral condition (I would call it a borderline territory) that lies somewhere between truth and falsehood and where dissimulation could be found to work: “dissimulation being nothing other than a veil composed of honest shadows and violent precautions, from which one does not make falsehood, but one gives the truth some rest . . . 108

More than this, Cavallo, following Francesco De Sanctis, avers that “this period witnessed a wholesale spread of dissimulation throughout all aspects of life.”109 On the one hand, in quite explicit terms, such as can be found in handbooks to guide young men into the intricate and devious ways of courtly and political life, the best way to succeed was by creating “a mask to preserve one’s inner self.”110 Thus Cavallo quotes from Guicciardini’s Recordi, #103, to bring out the essence of this cynical perspective: 106 107 108 109 110

Cavallo, The Romance Epics, p. 121. Zatti, The Quest for Epic, p. 196. Ibid, p. 199. Cavallo, The Romance Epics, p. 226. Ibid.

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The tyrant uses every possible diligence to discover the secret of the heart . . . and therefore, if you don’t want him to understand you, think diligently and guard yourself with great industry from all the things that can expose you, using more diligence in not letting yourself be known than he uses in attempting to know you”111

Even Giordano Bruno in his Spaccio claims that “a studied Dissimulation . . . is the handmaiden to Prudence and shield of the Truth.” On the other hand, this form of disguising, for all its subtlety, is rather superficial. These kind of maneuvers are defensive and sometimes offensive, but they presume an inner consciousness, a self that needs to be shielded from attack and able to strike back when the opportune moment arises. It is a heroic virtue, a tactic. The other kind of prudentia that operates behind the scenes, between the lines, beyond any ordinary focalization is that which constructs a very different kind of self, a consciousness floating on a bubbling lake of unconsciousness itself precariously balanced over an unfathomable abyss. This is Job’s cosmic fear of being lost in the dark caverns of Sheol: I go where I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and of the Shadow of Death. The land of utter gloom, as darkness itself, of deep shadow without order, and which is manifest as darkness. Job 10:21–22

Ethan Dor-Shav glosses this text, this cri du coeur from Job, who is only just discovering he has a heart to cry out of at all: Job perceives Sheol, or the world of the dead, as “darkness incarnate.” Sheol also evokes the oceanic Abyss: “Darkness that you cannot see, and an abundance of waters that cover you” [Job 11:8], leaving no doubt that in its cosmology, Job’s cosmic pit is one of water, submerged in the deepest heart of the primordial Sea, beneath the plate of the earth.112

This is the situation that men and women felt, we presume, when they cast themselves out of their Jewishness, frightened by the threats of pogrom and deprivation of all they owned and made for themselves, and when they found themselves unable to accept the new customs and practices of the religion that continued to persecute them and treated them as filthy excrescences of the body politic. This too is how generation after generation their progeny found themselves in perpetual suspicion, cast ever further into the desert, beyond the realms of law and society, barely able to hold on to the mask they could not find a mirror to see on their own faces. 111 112

Cited by Cavallo, The Romance Epics, p. 226. Ethan Dor-Shav, “Job’s Path to Enlifghtenment”Azure (Spring 5768/2008) 116.

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Here at best we could say that the prudent mind creates a series of masks to wear, and in the process keeps shifting what it is hiding and protecting. This is partly expressed in Torquato Accetto’s Della dissimulazione onesta, an ironic title if there ever were one: . . . the foxes among us are many and they are not always recognized, and when they are recognized, it is still difficult to use art against art, and in that case the one who knows how to maintain the appearance of a fool will have the greater success, because feigning belief in those who want to trick us can be the cause of getting them to see things our way.113

A number of modifications will be in order here. (1) First of all, this is not all a defensive posture in the tradition of classical eiron, such as Brutus in Livy’s Early History of Rome, where the young prince, allowed to live after his royal parents are killed in a coup by the tyrants only because he plays the fool, the dumb brute, waits patiently for many years until, with the rape of Lucretia by the bright young star of the Tarquin clan and her exemplary suicide, he can step forward and claim his rightful title as king of the Romans. This again is a crafty ploy, a dolon, achieved by mētis, because the hero simply puts off the moment of his triumphant action — justice through strength. (2) Then it still presumes a secret self, integral and fully formed, more than just in potentia, ready to spring forth, like a jack-in-the-box, whereas the darker version of this prudential concept envisions the self being created both in the long period of humiliation and anxiety and then in the action which, unlike heroic virtú, expresses itself obliquely and with guile, seeking not so much power and prestige as survival to another stage in its long wait for an end to the ordeal. (3) Lastly this kind of prudentia, as it melds together waiting and hopefulness, already consolidated in the Sephardic use of esperança to express the Hebrew tikva, hope which is patient trust in God and His mitzvot, turns the classical mētis into something more intricate and memorable: the midrashing of self-development and national history.114 For those who find it difficult to conceive of hope and to put their faith 113 114

Cited in Cavallo, The Romance Epics, p. 227. José Faur, “Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Vico and Rabbinic Tradition” Pensar para el nuevo siglo: Giambattista Vico y la cultura europea vol. 3 (La Città del Sole, 2001) 916– 938, trans. David Ramirez online at betyosef.org (1 June 2008). The key passages are, with slight modifications to make the translation clear and idiomatic) “Historically, the derasha filled the vacuum created by the destruction of the political (the monarchy), religious (Jerusalem Temple) and judicial (the Sanhedrin or Supreme Court) institutions in the year 70 [CE] . . . In concrete terms, the derasha replaces government institutions and bureaucracies” (p. 933) and derasha, that is, midrashing, “builds bridges that will allow new strategies of social action and spiritual formation” (p. 934). Whereas derasha is strictly speaking an exegetical trope with cultural implications, as Faur explains, I am using midrashing as a neologistic gerundive of the Hebrew word to make it an active verb which indicates action taken on the political and social stage of history.

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in tikva, there is always an illusory tifla, the foolish things of this world and the false illusions — imposed mythical figures of the next world and the one beyond that. This makes it more than either bowing down to power or resisting power, as Cavallo suggests in regard to the Italian epic poets: it is transforming power, in the sense that Job does more than bow down patiently to the afflictions put on him by the Satan or resisting the divine and threatening power assumed to be speaking to him out of the whirlwind. For after resisting the false comforts of his friends and Elihu and after backing off into a simulated silence in the face of a heavenly voice that can do no more than claim obedience on the grounds of priority and brute force, Job receives a different breakthrough of the divine than that of fear and trembling, that is, something that does not call for heroic sufferings. God comes back, tells the friends Job’s complaints against them were correct, and so was his refusal to submit to the satanic argument that calls for submission and self-denial, and that it is now their obligation to give their old friend recompense for his losses. God furthermore reverses the normal lines of genealogical development by providing a new generation of sons and daughters, and creates a new legal precedent by both giving the daughters full access to their father’s heritage and even gives to them individual names to be recorded in the national archives, the marasha of Scriptures, but not to the sons. In this light, Tasso can be seen to be masking, veiling and concealing both the political thematics of his epic and the private and personal wrestling of his artistic soul with the authoritarian strictures of his times. His poetry, like those of his predecessors Boiardo and Arisosto, in their own peculiar ways, open up the space in which we can see the illusions played out on the stage of history. However, before we can apply through analogy this insight to our discussion of the Marranos and Crypto-Jews on the Moradas of New Mexico, observe carefully what Zatti has to say about the phenomenon: As a poet assailed by doubts regarding his art, Tasso created the circumstances for his own artistic auto-da-fé by convoking the jury of critics to judge the orthodoxy of his work, while as a Christian wracked by doubts about his religious faith in the same period, he voluntarily subjected himself twice to examination before the fearsome tribunal of the Inquisition . . . Like the Pharisee Nicodemus, who only went to visit Jesus at night, those dissenting from the Church of Rome often kept their true convictions secret and outwardly showed devotion to the Catholic faith.115

In other words, without imputing to the poem — or any creative work of art in the period what Ernst Gombrich calls a physiognomic interpretation, wherein the mentality of the age is supposedly hidden in the textures of its productions — allegorical status or to the author exemplary qualities beyond his 115

Zatti, The Quest for Epic, p. 201.

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individual experiences, we can see that dissimulation permeates almost every facet of the life associated with Tasso and the Liberata. Reading this requires at least a double consciousness, (1) of its public rhetorical address to the issues of the day and the traditions by which those matters are articulated in public discussion, and (2), in a more subtle and complex way, a realization that Tasso, like other artists and thinkers of the Renaissance, were grappling with demons or at least bogeymen released into their lives by the breakdown of the old LatinChristian synthesis we call the Middle Ages. Interpreting the period in order to find evidence of facts otherwise hidden or lost is a different order of business, to be sure, but one we must proceed with cautiously if we are to come to grips with the Penitentes as a place where Fuzzy Jews could find a safe haven of sorts for several hundreds of years. Hence the importance of Accetto’s dictum: “Dissimulation is the skill of not showing things as they are. One simulated what one is not, and dissimulates what one is.”116 If, however, acts of simulation (sprezzatura) are associated with ostentation and magnificence, then we see that masks in the mirror hardly reflect back two equal and opposite sides in a chess game. More than that: the Greek old comedy’s interaction of eiron and alazon, somewhat moralized by Aristotle in The Nichomachean Ethics, functions in more subtle, dynamic ways in rabbinic discourses, where, instead of the Socratic teacher driving the young upstart interlocutor to the position where he confesses he knows and has known nothing until this moment of enlightenment, each position — the School of Shimai and the School of Hillel — are recognized as legitimate ways to halakhah because each argues for the sake of Heaven. The philosopher may be a daimon, communicating between heaven and earth, between ideas in the pure ether and technological knowledge in the world of nomos, but the rabbis debate in the world of ordinary day-to-day concerns — mealtime purity, domestic politics, agricultural ethics, classroom behavior. Ironic humility, assumed or real madness, and chronic anamorphous — a constant stretching of the contours of the self so out of proportion and perspective that it is barely recognizable as an ego at all — can be extended to two other significant modes of occultation: on the one hand, a dazzling exterior, blinding the audience or interlocutor to what is being actually said and done, if anything at all; and on the other, telling the truth with such intensity of feeling and accumulation of detail that it is almost impossible to realize that what is presented is not “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

116

Zatti, The Quest for Epic, p. 205.

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C HA P T E R I I I

THE MACHINERY OF SECRETS AND THE MACHINATIONS OF SILENCE: CONSPIRACIES, CONTRAPTIONS AND LUDIBRIA

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A águia não ataca a águia, nem uma vibora a outré vibora, e o homem sempre maquina contra sua própria espécie. An eagle never attacks an eagle, nor a viper another viper, but man always conspires against his own species. — Saavedra Fajaro (1640)1 Throughout the fifteenth century the Carvajal and Santa María families labored as critical leaders and administrators within the cathedral of Plasencia — negotiating their own unique form of Spanish of conviviencia, or co-existence, which required religious conversion for the Jewish Ha-Levi family, but cultural and intellectual transformation on the part of the Catholic Carvajal family . . . Roger Luis Martinez2

1

2

Saavedra Fejardo, Empresas politicas, idea de un principe politico-cristiano (1640). Cited by Edmir Missio, “A dissimulação como virtude entre os jesuítas da ContraReforma”Memorandum (2005) 121. Roger Luis Martinez, “Before the Collapse of Coexistence: Catholics, Jews, Conversos Collaborated in the Bishopric of Plasencia” Halapid 14:1 (Winter 2007) 8. Further data is available online in a draft chapter from his as-yet unpublished manuscript.

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The first section of this third chapter deals in general with simulation, dissimulation, machinations and contraptions. Then it examines one particular kind of conspiracy or contraption set up to answer the state-run Inquisition. In Portuguese, as in other European languages, the word machinery carries with it pre-modern connotations of intricate plots and conspiracies, as well as classical notions of theatrical props, such as pulleys and other kinds of apparatus to make gods appear out of clouds, castles to open revealing choruses of children, and monsters flying over the stage. From our perspective, these kinds of old fashioned machines seem more comically clumsy than efficient, have a quaintness about them that belies the powerful engines that they can be, and suggest heavy-handed melodramatic plotlines instead of slick and subtle cinematic trickery. Why were such contraptions needed? According to Helen Nader, “Castilians of the fifteenth century lived in a bewildering atmosphere of social and political upheaval.”3 She spends most of the time in her book on The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, 1350–1550 discussing the forces shifting and changing the configuration of Catholic Spain, only occasionally referring to circumstances in Sephardic culture. In an analogous way, Mario Biagioli discusses how Galileo and other scientists in the same period were forced to invent new instruments to see, measure and control the discoveries they were making, including not just telescopes and microscopes but also “instruments of credit”, that is, creating institutionalized machinery to oversee and manage the commerce in ideas,

3

Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance 1350–1550 (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University press, 1979) p. 19; this book is available through The Library of Iberian Resources Online, http://libro.uca.edu /mendoza/msr1 (received 27/07/2005).

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patronage and influence that these breakthroughs in knowledge necessitated.4 Thus in intellectual matters, meaning philosophy, science, and technology, and in religious, political and financial developments the seventeenth century reorganized itself as a contraption with newfangled instruments, apparatuses, institutions and formal and informal social relationships. These changes also created and resulted from transformations in the imagination. Shifts in sensibility, evaluations of dissimulation and secrecy, and other profound distortions in mentality all took place at varying levels of self-awareness. Sephardic Jews, in all the fuzzy sets we have begun to set forth and distinguish, not only also experienced these same bewildering upheavals, but in Spain they played key roles in creating the kind of centralized, relatively stable kingdom that arose by the time of the Reconquista, a Catholic Monarchy that was as persecutory and intolerant as the Church itself. Nader adds to her introductory remarks the claim that There was no well defined medieval tradition to serve as a guide amid the confusion of the period. Instead, Castilians embarked on a series of innovations in every aspect of life without discarding old patterns in any systematic way, without reconciling the conflicts that inevitably developed between old and new, and without correlating new systems with one another.5

In a way that was only partly analogous, Jewish society in Castile and elsewhere on the Iberian Peninsula faced a series of anxiety-ridden innovations which both responded to and exacerbated the crises everyone in Spain was experiencing. As we have already suggested — and will develop through the rest of this book — Sephardim had already gone through the series of Maimonidean Debates that divided the Jewish society along intellectual, spiritual, and political lines,6 roughly corresponding to the collective code-names of Rambam (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon or Maimonides, standing for the traditional Gaonic rationalism of Jewish jurisprudence and ethical philosophy based on a refined rabbinical study 4

5 6

Mario Biagioli, Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Nader, The Mendoza Family, p. 19. Joseph A. Buijs, “Introduction” to Maimonides: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed., Joseph A. Buijs (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). “Twelfth-century Spain had become the center of Greek and Arabic learning under Abbasid rule. Arabic scholars not only disseminated Greek culture but made original contributions in such areas as medicine, astronomy, science and philosophy” (p. 1). Jews played key roles in these enterprises as well, both as translators and commentators and, whether converted to Islam or still practicing Jews, as original thinkers in their own right. The ensuing debates had to do, as we shall see, with differences in world view concerning the so-called “Greek sciences,” the way in which to reconcile such non-Jewish learning with biblical and rabbinical texts, and the behavior appropriate in a society where the dominant group could not easily be dismissed as idolatrous, irrational or immoral.

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of the Bible and the Talmud and their associated commentaries) and Ramban (Rabbi Moses ben Nachman or Nachmanides, standing for the revolutionary kabbalistic system of mysticism, charismatic readings of Scripture, and dynastic governance).7 Though neither figure is in himself as extreme and mutually exclusive as followers would want to claim for polemical reasons, the contrast does help frame the situation.8 When the long period of Christian conversionist persecutions began in the late twelfth century, starting with a series of so-called debates between Jewish and Catholic speakers and moving into public burnings of Talmud and other sacred books and then culminating in a series of street riots and pogroms, there was a mass conversion of perhaps a third to a half of all the Jews in Spain.9 This phenomenon has to be understand, therefore, not only as a consequence of increased pressures by a self-confidant Church Militant, armed with a knowledge of the post-biblical Jewish system of writing thanks to renegade rabbis who joined their ranks and took leading roles in the attack on rabbinic or Talmudic Judaism; but also as a result of inner weaknesses in 7

8

9

Yeshayaha Leibowitz, The Faith of Maimonides, trans. John Glucker (New York: Adama Books, 1987). “For the sake of eradicating idolatry, which could arise from a misapprehension of the true meaning of the words of the Scripture, Maimonides required the whole immense philosophical apparatus which he employed” (p. 21). Later Leibowitz writes: “The whole extensive philosophical apparatus employed by Maimonides has only the single purpose of reducing the knowledge of God to the knowledge of Godness through the removal of any corporeality or anthropomorphism from the belief in God . . . Man may only attain this knowledge after he has succeeded in overcoming his imaginative faculty through the faculty of his intellect. For it is the imaginative faculty which nourishes the passions and drives which tie man to things ‘other than God’” (p. 43). Ekka Klein, “The First Maimonidean Controversy: A Summary,” extracted from the author’s “Power and Patrimony: the Jewish Community of Barcelona, 1050–1250” (PhD Thesis, Harvard University, 1996) pp. 216–222 and now online at http://www.nyu.edu/ classes/klein/maimcont. (Seen 8/03/2004). Of the Ramban, Ben-Sasson, “Maimonidean Controversy”, avers: “The position of Na[c]hmanides is remarkable for its simultaneous flexibility in expression and rigidity of mental attitude. Seeing that the extreme anti-Maimonidean stance taken by the rabbis of northern France and by Solomon of Montpellier had no chance of finding support among the leading circles of Jewish society in Provence and Spain, he therefore advised the anti-Maimonidean camp to adopt a moderate stand in order to achieve at least what was possible.” The controversy broke out again, and then again, and then — it was too late. The Iberian Jewish community was riven with dissent, fissured, and unable to stand up to the persecutions of the Church, the inquisitions and the expulsions, the forced conversions . . . “When the controversy flared up again at the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th century,” Ben-Sasson says, “the immediate catalyst was the extreme allegorical exegesis of certain rationalists,” as though the fault were all or mostly the fault of the Maimonideans and not the Nachmanideans. “However,” he concedes, almost allowing us to see beyond the polemics to the condition of near despair and futility with which the Sephardim were left to view the machinations of the Catholic Monarchy, “it came to encompass the whole range of the content of Jewish education and the question of the possibility or impossibility of synthesis between ‘Greek wisdom’ and the Torah of Moses.”

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the Sephardic communities, such as defections by assimilationists swayed by the arguments of Averroes and other materialistic and skeptical philosophers, cynics dismayed by the inability of rabbinical authorities to prevail in debates or to protect their congregations and so willing to make strategic changes in their own status in order to gain the advantage of what they presumed would be the lesser of two evils, and more cunning individuals and families seeking to outmaneuver both the weakening rabbinical establishment and the misperceived tolerance and political realism of the Spanish monarchy and Church.10 Whatever the reasons, all at once in the first half of the fifteenth century, a large proportion of the Sephardic population was transformed into nominal New Christians, whose sincerity of conversion and understanding of the adopted faith could be only treated as questionable — if not always suspicious and mocked as more cynical than sincere by both the rabbinical authorities and the surrounding Catholic culture and its state and ecclesiastical institutions. This situation, to put it mildly, created a new crisis of its own. Though the Jewish conversos should have been accepted into the body politic of the kingdoms where they lived and the corpus christi of the Church into which they had been baptized, whether voluntarily or under duress, the benefits to these Jews on the whole were mitigated by three factors: 1. Reaction by secular and religious bodies was generally one of suspicion and distrust to the point where the denomination of neuvo christiano was extended beyond the individuals and their initial period of conversion to become a whole new category of limited rights and privileges; “newness” became a sign of insincerity, treason, and pollution. 2. So great was this sense of unease in the larger Catholic community, that two new institutionalized contraptions were created to deal with it, (a) the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition and (b) the promulgation of a series of Statutes of Purity of Blood. 3. Consequently, discrimination and persecution did not disappear with conversion, intermarriage, and other formal acts of integration. Instead, there was a new version of The Jewish Question: nothing less than The Problem of the New Christians. This seemed exacerbated by the close 10

Rabbi Lipman, “The Maimonidean Controversies” Gates to Jewish Heritage online at http://www.jewishgates. com/file.asp?File_ID=97 (Seen 21/01/2004). Lipman argues, obviously taking a traditionalist position, which in Orthodoxy today means the proNachmanidean side: “The upper classes in Spain and Provence became more assimilated, studying more philosophical treatises and applying their liberal allegorical approach to not only Torah texts, but to halakhah as well. They viewed numerous traditional actions as symbolic, rather than commanded . . . The traditional Jews viewed the upper classes as sinning heretics and blamed secular studies, philosophy, science, and metaphysics as the cause of their downfall. The levels of acrimony threatened to split the Jewish world apart.”

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proximity of a still legal and functioning Jewish community in most of the Spanish territories. The rulers of the Catholic kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and then other smaller entities absorbed into the unified state by the end of the fifteenth century ordered the expulsion of these practicing Jews — that is, an ethnic and confessional purging of Spain of its nominal Jews in order to regulate and monitor more efficiently the converso population. What had up to 1492 been a sporadic and random series of expulsions and pogroms after that date became the rule, and by the end 1500 the Peninsula, including Galicia and Navarre, which had resisted these impositions, became officially Judenrein. The development of this new converso problem rather than the old Jewish problem11 in Spain called forth a radical shift in sensibility and intellectual cunning which was necessary if New Christians were to survive the threats that came from mass conversions and constant persecution. Like the crisis described by Nader in regard to Christians in Castile, wherein “two definitions of Spanish monarchy were developed”12 and which led to the eventual domination of one over the other to such an extent that it has only rather recently been realized that an opposition even existed, so too the dominance by the faction led by the followers of Ramban has virtually effaced from the record the existence of the other side, the followers of Rambam, who themselves had a very different concept of what history was and was for, and how it should be recorded and its lessons applied to current life.13 Based on more than the Guide to the Perplexed but all of Maimonides’ writings, the controversies infiltrated almost every aspect of Jewish life and thought. The debates centred on matters of belief, practice and meaning in rabbinical texts and encounters with the outside non-Jewish world.14 11

12 13

14

Dayle Seidenspinner-Núñez dates this transformation to 1449, when there was “the first outbreak of violence and discrimination against judeoconversos”; “Introduction” The Writings of Teresa de Cartagena (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 1998), p. 3, n. 4. Nader, The Mendoza Family, p. 20. Daniel Hartman, Maimonides: Torah and the Philosophical Quest (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1976). “The only action necessary before the condition in history could be changed was teshuvah, the turning to God and Torah . . . The quest was not for individual salvation but for salvation of the entire community . . . God was revealed through the life-history of the community” (p. 5). “A whole new way of life emerges when we maintain that communality does not define the contents of truth. A whole new person emerged when one is encouraged to explore freely in the world of nature and to discover truths which are demonstrable to all men, and when traditional authority must justify itself to all rational creatures by rational method” (pp. 18–19). Daniel Jeremy Silver, Maimonidean Criticism and the Maimonidean Controversy, 1180–1240 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1965). According to Silver, “The Maimonidean Controversy was a statement of fear” (p. 2) and “became the justification for any and all speculation — much of which he would he would have disapproved” (p. 4). As the debates

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As Naomi R. Frankel points out, “The involvement of the Rabbis of Northern France, the herems and counter herems leading to the dramatic book burnings of the Guide [for the Perplexed] in 1232 and the subsequent cyclic flaring of public controversy down to modern times is now the standard fare of all Jewish intellectual histories.”15 Nader explains that these two mentalities — for they are more than political factions or schools of thought16 — were constituted by “the relationship between past and the present, the nature of historical sources, the validity of universal models derived from philosophy, and the worth of man’s rational and irrational natures . . . ”17 These two models of historiography, politics, and religious governance can be grouped under the titles of their main proponents as letrados and cabelleros18. The losing opposition persons in this configuration were the caballeros or “military professionals,” knights in the strict sense of the term, as they were opponents of a centralized monarchy and preferred the feudal system, thus stressing the role and initiative of individuals and individual families rather than courtiers, bureaucrats and civil servants; they allied themselves with the old style rural elites and the new bourgeoisie. The winners, due to virtually unpredictable circumstances at the end of the fifteenth century,

15

16

17 18

continued, it became clear, Silver argues, “It was not fear of philosophy nor ignorance of philosophy which precipitated it but a breakdown of faith among certain elements within the western communities, among anonymous persons who when pressed claimed the Moreh and the Mada as support of their fancies . . . ” (p. 114). Naomi R. Frankel, “Maimonidean Controversy and the Story of Creation” Avodah 8:27 (Wednesday, October 24 2001) online at http://www.aishdas.org/articles/rambam_ creation (Seen 2/4/2003) Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “Maimonidean . . . Controversy . . . ” Encyclopedia Judaica CD Rom Edition on Radical Torah Thought (2003 Merkaz Moreshet Yisrael, Inc.) online at http://www.merkaz.com/rambam/maimoncontro. Ben-Sasson argues, however: “This attempt to undermine the economic and social foundations of the leadership of the Baylonian gaonim went hand in hand with Maimonides’ opposition to their program of studies and his contempt for their very office . . . The gaonate is represented as corrupt, and typical academy study as being of questionable value . . . The claim of the intellectual to replace an aristocratic hierarchy seemed to be combined with an attempt to impose Greek systematic modes of classification in place fof the traditional many-voiced flow of Talmudic discussion.” Cp. Faur, Horizontal Society. Nader, The Mendoza Family, p. 20. In subsequent discussions we shall note how certain wealthy and influential Jewish families, in order to try to stay the effects of this converso problem, would ally themselves with powerful Catholic clans, and in their efforts together to block the dangerous and demeaning effects of what they presumed to be the regressive attitudes of urban groups and illiberal clergy fostered theories of governance that actually were detrimental than anything they could have imagined. The disaster that followed was a direct factor in why certain of these families chose to take refuge in the northern outposts of New Spain, in what was hoped would be a Nuevo México — or at least a place outside of the reach of state and Church.

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were the letrados, the new intellectual class of university graduates in canon and civil law, the men who made possible the centralization of the monarchy and the coordination of state and ecclesiastical control. With their international connections and leanings towards the philosophical and scientific innovations of the Renaissance, it would have appeared that the recent converts were a progressive, liberal and tolerant force in the Spain that was to emerge in the sixteenth century. Ironically, however, they helped to create a Spain that was divorced from the main currents of thought, practice and power in the rest of Western Europe and which increasingly lapsed into a rigid, stagnant, and backwards-looking regime. This contradiction has often been noted but not explained. As Nader points out, During most of the [fifteenth] century, these two historical approaches coexisted in support of their mutual objective; but at the end of the century, changing political circumstances made the letrado approach more attractive to the Catholic Monarchs. This letrado interpretation of Spanish history swept the field so completely and for so long — it prevails to the present day — that the very existence of the Renaissance historical tradition in fifteenth-century Castile was almost forgotten. Understanding the process by which Spanish society rejected humanist historiography is one of the keys to understanding the nature and development of the renaissance in Trastámara Castile.19

The case here of the Sephardim is peculiar to some extent, of course. Once the problem of the Jews became the problem of the New Christians, that is, once Judaism was illegal and Jewish communal life was no longer possible, the conversos were fully within the legal jurisdiction of Church and State. The new problem therefore had to do with secrecy, heresy and suspicions, with their attendant phenomena of dissimulation, confusion, and anxiety. In other words, it was a form of madness designated as quixotic. The quixotic situation was such, even before the crisis peaked in the middle of the fifteenth century, that individuals and families who sought to ride out the storm knew they would have to take drastic action and in ways that would encompass more than small steps. Survival of the old sense of conviviencia, whereby Jews, Christians, and sometimes Muslims, could dream of living and working together in harmony and mutually developing their own separate cultures, would not be possible — not even as a pious or rebellious myth. Even more than mere continuation of the old ideals of medieval Iberia, the ability of rich and powerful clans to take advantage of the changes occurring elsewhere in Europe under the name of Renaissance and Reformation, would be possible only by a concerted effort to work together. These alliances would necessitate intermarrying, converting to Catholicism where deemed necessary, and acting in 19

Nader, The Mendoza Family, pp. 20–21.

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concert to use their now collective wealth, intelligence and influence. But at best all they could hope to do would be to create a secret socio-political contraption strong enough to protect and enhance these interests. In the chapter that follows, we will set out some of the evidence for the historical existence of this new kind of covert apparatus, why it was needed and how it was engineered, as well as what it was up against in the Spain that was taking shape at the same time — in Spain itself, the new unified Catholic monarchies of Aragon and Castile, the completion of the Reconquista, the emergence of the converso problem, the establishment of the Inquisition, and promulgation in many civic, military and religious organizations of statutes of purity of blood. Then outside of Iberia, there were the results of the discoveries of New Worlds, the development of international trade and commerce, along with more efficient means of finance, the increase and change of scientific, technological and philosophical knowledge, with the greater speed and accuracy of publication and commentary through print culture. Though in many ways the attempt to counteract the power of the repressive, regressive state and ecclesiastical machinery of Iberia failed and left behind an ever-diminishing number of New Christians and their Old Christian allies, so that Spain and Portugal fell behind the rest of Europe in terms of science, philosophy and religious knowledge,20 there were several ways in which the new epistemological apparatus succeeded: (1) a large number of Europe’s creative thinkers and artists were of converso origin and used their new perspective to revolutionize the mind of the modern world; these figures appear in Spain and Portugal, France and Italy, Holland and England, most unnoticed as New Christians in their own time and few thereafter; (2) spiritual experiences were reshaped by a small group of mystics and theologians from the same cultural source, able to feel and see in ways not possible for those bound to dogmatic and conservative paradigms; and in a smaller number of instances, where all ties seem to have been cut and memory faded of the traditional ideals of Judaism and Christianity, pockets of strange mixtures of belief and practice developed, indicative, not so much of viable models for the rest of the world, but flashes of genius and wonderful, uncanny alternatives. Among these bizarre offshoots of the national counter-contraption of Marrano sensibility, we assign the Penitentes. On the one hand, they have to be classified with conversos who recognized as Christian mystics and saints, such as Theresa 20

Paulo Mendes Pinto, “Os sefarditas portugueses e a ciência do Renascimento: Ensaio sobre Religião, Ciência & Utensilagem Mental” online at http://www.fl.ul.pt/unidades/ sefarditas/textos_sef.htm (seen 15/6/2008).

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de Avila or Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz; on the other hand, they can be analogous to various Jewish messianic cults and mystical radicals, such as Shabbatai Tzvi or Jacob Frank. Yet the Penitentes, and the Marranos who joined with them, should not be dismissed as fanatics, holy fools, or primitive ritualists. To understand more sympathetically this little group of people who lost themselves in the outermost fringes of the Spanish Empire, we have to create more refined contexts in which to see where they come from, how they develop, and what their experience means to them, their fellows in the Hermandad, and the civilization to which they belong. One of the key elements in the contraption set up by the rich and powerful Christian and Jewish families typified by the compact described by Robert Luis Martinez in the head-note21 to this chapter is the “rejection of humanist historiography” mentioned by Nader, as this development helped to turn the Spanish mentality as a whole from the progressive aspects of the Renaissance in Italy, France and elsewhere in western Europe.22 It is also important to the history of the founding of the Penitentes, in that the leader of the march northwards along the Camino Royal in 1592, was Don Juan de Oñate-Cordido, a descendant of Pablo de Santa María and the Carvajal families.23 21

22 23

The fuller picture of the economic and social actions by the merging of the Santa Marias and the Carvajalos is given in Roger Louis Martinez’s dissertation From Sword to Seal: The Emblematic Rise of the Carvajal Family in Early Modern Spain (1390–1516). Because the author has put an embargo on citations from this work, we can only call attention to the general nature of the thesis and the argument as expounded in his talk to the Society for Crypto-Jewish Studies (see the headnote to this chapter) and on his online homepage where he prints a two-page synopsis of the dissertation. He also presents an embargoed draft version of Chapter 4 of his thesis last updated 10/30/07: “Creating a Family Confederation, 1422–1431.” Given the nature of an historical dissertation of this sort, Martinez focuses on the specific details available in archival materials indicating the way in which the two families, one New Christian and the other Old Christian, gradually took advantage of their access to cathedral funds in Plasencia, extended their political influence to the local civil government, and then parleyed their wealth and achieved titles to extend that influence to wider spheres of interest, including an attempt to direct the election of the papacy in 1511.Martinez describes the meeting in Pisa in 1511 with Spanish Cardinal Bernardino Lopez de Carvajal in opposition to Pope Julius II as “the apex of the Carvajal family’s strategic and multi-generational efforts to relinquish their caballero swords in favor of the seals of councilors and officials in the church and monarchy.” We have attempted here in Chapter III to go further than the hints supplied by Martinez in his talk in order to flesh out the way the confederation of these two rich and powerful families “significantly aided the Carvajal family in altering their occupational, wealth, and social status” — in fact, as I suggest, this alliance, one of several others (though never very many, to be sure) significantly altered the course of Iberian and Hispanic New World history. Nader, The Mendoza Family, p. 21. José Antonio Esquibel, compiler, “The Jewish-converso Lineage of Don Juan de Oñate” as presented in “New Light on the Jewish-converso Ancestry of Don Juan de Oñate: A Research Note,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 7:2 (Spring 1998) 174–190.

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The historical works which transformed the way in which most Spanish leaders thought about themselves in the world can be shown to have their prime impetus on the writing of two men, Pablo Garcia de Santa María (1350–1435) and his son Al(f)onso de Cartagena (1384–1456). The Cartagena family’s crest “consisted of a white fleur de lis on a green background,” which SeidenspinnerNúñez interprets as “symbolizing their descent from the Virgin.”24 However, this emblem could conceal a more mystical Jewish significance, as I have showed in my discussions of the green colour in my study of Sir Gawain and the Knight of the Green Chapel.25 If we consider that there is more to history than meets the eye — not just in the rabid anti-Jewish hatred in the Church’s iconography or in the legal statements inscribed in official documents — then we will be no more shocked by we discover about the relationship between wealthy, sophisticated Christian and Jewish families than we are when we find out that Michaelangelo painted secret meanings into the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, the very heart and nerve-centre of Catholic Europe.26 As long ago as 1837, William H. Prescott could grapple with hints of the alliances we are dealing with. Not only were the problems about how to treat marriages between conversos and unconverted Jews, as Netanyahu and his students have argued, where the rabbis dealt with these situations in their responsa, tending in the early years to accept the principle that even a bad Jew — a renegade or a mocker of ancestral ways — is still a Jew in terms of the laws pertaining to marriage, heritage and commercial contracts; but Prescott points out: A great scandal was occasioned also by the intermarriages which still occasionally took place between Jews and Christians; the latter condescending to repair their dilapidated fortunes by these wealthy alliances, though at the expense of their vaunted purity of blood.27

More problems arose when the Inquisition began its investigations into the sincerity of beliefs and practices among the newly-converted Sephardim, for these suspicions endangered the legal status of those individuals and families

24 25

26

27

This and related data is available at the website of the New Mexican Hispanic Culture Preservation League maintained by Angel Espinosa. (Seen 16/06/2008) Seidenspinner-Núñez, Teresa de Cartagena, p. 4, n. 8. Norman Simms, Sir Gawain and the Knight of the Green Chapel. Waltham, MD: University Press of America, 2002 Cristina Ruiz, “The new Da Vinci Code: Secrets of the Sistine Chapel” Timesonline, from the Sunday Times (15 June 2008) online at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/ faith/article4113094.ece?print=yes&rand (Seen 22/06/2008). This comment is in response to a book by Rabbi Benjamin Blech and Roy Doliner, The Sistine Secrets: Unlocking the Codes in Michaelangelo’s Defiant Masterpiece (J.R. Book, 2008). William H. Prescott, History of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic, new and rev. ed. John Foster Kirk (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1892; origin., 1837) p. 279.

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that assumed their strategic changes in public identity could overcome the old limitations placed on Jewish participation in all aspects of civil and ecclesiastical society. Though Prescott’s language is somewhat clunky and old-fashioned, the point he is making cuts to the quick: The Jews, who had obtained an intimation of these proceedings, resorted to their usual crafty policy for propitiating the sovereigns. They commissioned one of their body to tender a donative of thirty thousand ducats towards defraying the expenses of the Moorish war.28

The alliances between the two groups had more than a financial purpose or a merely nefarious design in thwarting the legitimate religious aims of the Holy Office on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs need for political stability. Prescott praises the “laudable endeavours” of the Spanish clergy in their work of conversion and blames, perhaps ironically, “the more authoritative rhetoric of the Jewish Rabbins [sic], who compared the persecutions of their brethren to those which their ancestors had suffered under Pharaoh.”29 What the mid-nineteenth-century American historian could not see is the more subtle, sophisticated and Baroque programme of action set in motion to change the course of Spanish history, to bring it back, rather, to its more tolerant and cosmopolitan roots, by re-engaging with the Renaissance and aspects of the Reformation that sought to reform rather than break the Roman Church. That is why we are continuing to focus on the alliance of the Ha-Cohen family with that of the Cartegena clan, the Carvajals and the Santa Marias.30 In addition, there are the writings of Pablo’s granddaughter, María de Cartagena, “the spiritual precursor of both St. Teresa de Avila in the sixteenth century and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in the seventeenth in combining devotional writing with an autobiographical focus and a defense against male detractors.”31 She herself, like Alonso, are only two and three generations into the life of Christian conversion and their works show no overt evidence of CryptoJudaism, although they reveal ambiguities and hints of confusion and pain characteristic of the Marrano condition. As well as Maria, other members of the family proved themselves to be notable figures in Spanish cultural history. Pablo’s brother, Alvar García de Santa Maria, was also a distinguished politician and historian, “who served as royal scribe and secretary and royal chronicler of 28 29 30

31

Prescott, Ferdinand and Isabella, p. 279. Ibid, p. 281. Tomas Sanchez, “Our Jewish Lines” gives long genealogical lists showing the filiation of the Carvajal family and many of the settlers who traveled to New Mexico and whose descendants now claim ancestry among anousim; see: http://home.att.net/~PTrodriguez. printform/maluenda (seen 22/08/2008). Seidenspinner-Núñez, Teresa de Cartagena, p. 3.

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the court of Juan II”.32 How dangerous these forays into the very heart of the emergent centralized state were may be seen in the case of Dr. Alvar Sánchez de Santa María (ca. 1488–?),33 the very ambiguities and doubts about the birth and death dates indicating the precariousness of his position in the family’s history. The fourth son of Pedro de Cartagena, he was disinherited from his father’s will for undisclosed reasons: quia propter errorum suum regem indignacionem incurrit. Whatever indignation he incurred from royal favor was sufficient to make him a danger to the rest of the family, although his father went so far as to beg clemency from the king. The closer we come to the details of who comprised this family, the easier it is to see how they permeated the culture of their times, and therefore the importance of their influence on the culture that was emerging, caught up, as we are arguing, between an attempt to avoid the persecutory and retrograde aspects of the new Catholic state machinery and an almost unconscious complicity in forging the worst features of this new monstrosity. By treading a safe line and offering their services to the state whenever and wherever possible, they were granted a certificate of purity of blood, limpieza de sangre.34 While this accreditation allowed them technically to call themselves Old rather than New Christians, very soon, with so many former Jews taking similar steps, often through bribes and intimidation, the certificates had little meaning, and every new generation in this, as in all other converso families, was faced with formal and informal distrust and suspicion. This sense of insecurity can already be noted in Alonso de Cartegena’s Defensorium Unitatis Christianae (A Defense of Christian Unity) in 1450,35 a rather futile argument against the prejudices spreading rapidly through the Statutes of Blood Purity. Yet, futile as it was in the long-run of the next four hundred years, Alonso’s efforts to transform the way in which Spanish civilization conceived of itself — and this must include the Sephardim who went overseas under various names depicting their commitment to the Church or the Synagogue — bore different fruit in his translations of Cicero and Seneca.36 His versions of these two ancient Roman Stoic thinkers permeated the minds and culture of the people in ways that outlasted the damage of the Inquisition and the Statutes of Blood Purity. In one way, neither Pablo nor Alonso could be faulted in their commitment to the new faith, one chosen and the other inherited, but the history of this family and that of Spain is not so easy to describe or judge. As we will show in this chapter and the rest of this book, conscious assimilation to the Christian faith 32 33 34 35 36

Seidenspinner-Núñez, Teresa de Cartagena, p. 5, n. 11. Ibid, p. 5, 12. Ibid, p. 4. Ibid, p. 6, n. 14. Marcel Bataillon, Érasme et l’Éspagne: Recherches sur l’histoire spirituelle du xvie siècles (Geneva: Droz, 1998 [1937]) pp. 53–54.

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did not extinguish Jewish ways of thinking, and could be manifest in all fields of endeavor, from spirituality, mysticism and ecclesiastical governance, on the one hand, through legal, financial, military and civil administration on the other. Some of Spain’s most important saints in this period of history were not only of Jewish extraction, but their writings and deeds were, during and after their own lifetimes, questioned by the Holy Office and not always generously accepted until many centuries later.37 This infiltration of Jewishness — in the sense of radical distrust of authority, skepticism in regard to visionary experiences, interrogation at the profound levels of sacramental dogmas, demand for legal and logical coherence — though not necessarily rabbinic ideas, can be seen in another member of the same family alliance we have been tracing out, Fray Luis de Carvajal, a Franciscan friar trained at the Sorbonne, who defended the monastic life against reformers in his Apologia monasticae religionis diluens nugas Erasmi (Salamanca, 1528).38 Even some of her best-known and beloved authors — where would Spanish literature be without Don Quixote, La Celestina, and many other comic, satiric, and witty novelists, playwrights and poets? — rose up from the matrix of this ambiguous New Christian history and perhaps their centrality to the Spanish spirit, as Américo Castro points out throughout his España en su historia,39 indicates that the consciousness and unconsciousness of the people was changed for the better by the profound assimilation of this Jewishness into the national psyche. Now let us carry on with our survey of the Santa Maria and Carvajal families, insofar as they allow us to set the Penitentes and the Marranos on their moradas in the context of Spain’s troubled history. “Two of Pablo de Santa María’s five children were also ecclesiastics,” writes Seidenspinner-Núñez. The oldest, Gonzalo García de Santa María (1379/80–1448), was a professor at the University of Salamanca and subsequently bishop of Palencia; he also served on diplomatic and ecclesiastical missions for the Spanish court. The second son, Alonso de Cartagena (1385–1456), was bishop of Palencia before succeeding his father as bishop of Burgos; he was named judge of the Royal Tribunal of Juan II and with his brother Gonzalo attended the Council of Basel. Cantera Burgos lists twenty-six works written by Alonso de Cartagena and classifies them into works of law, history, and moral philosophy.40

There was also another son named Pedro de Cartagena (1387–1478) who was “a knight in the court of Juan II. He was one of the regidores (aldermen) of 37

38 39

40

For a discussion on how deeply Jews and Jewish ideas permeated the Church in the sixteenth century, see Bataillon, Érasme et l’Éspagne, p. 65 and esp. n.1. Bataillon, Érasme et l’Éspagne, p. 345. Américo Castro, España en su historia: Cristianos, Moros y Judíos (Barcelona: Critica, 2001 [1983]). Seidenspinner-Núñez, Teresa de Cartagena, p. 5.

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Burgos, a guard de corps of Juan II, and counselor to Enrique IV and to the Catholic Monarchs, Fernando and Isabel.”41 The further details of this illustrious family goes on and on, but at this point we must return to look at the three key figures in the picture we are trying to construct of one way in which certain Jewish and Christian families allied to try to protect themselves and enhance their collective prestige and influence. That a part of this family transferred itself to northern Mexico also brings us back to our focus on the Penitentes. One of the descendants of this family, Juan de Oñate, led the expedition into those territories where we today find the Hermandad most active.42 Salomon or Shlomo ha-Levi was a well-known and respected scholar and writer in the Jewish community,43 but then shortly after the pogroms in 1390 he converted44 to Christianity and became known by the baptismal name of Pablo.45 Born in 1350 or 1352 of a family from Aragon, his wealthy family ensured him a good education, combining Jewish and secular (that is, Christian-Latin) subjects, which Orae Dominguez believes made the path from Maimonides’ rationalism to Scholasticism “a short road.”46 Both before and after his conversion, Sholomo/Pablo boasted of his direct descent from the tribe of Levi, and more particularly the royal line of King David, and hence, when a Christian, he claimed to be a kinsman of the Virgin Mary.47 His departure from Judaism was in some senses a shock and surprise, but not completely. There are indications throughout his early career of leanings towards Christianity, away from Judaism, and centering on his Spanish/Castilian pride more than anything. This very Spanish pride,48 which is manifest in many Sephardim whether conversos or not, roused the jealousy and fury of many proud Old Christians. 41 42

43 44

45

46

47

48

Seidenspinner-Núñez, Teresa de Cartagena, p. 5. Charles Gibson, Spain in America (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper Torchbooks/ Harper & Row, 1966) p. 195. Seidenspinner-Núñez, Teresa de Cartagena, p. 4. Seidenspinner-Núñez puts the date of this conversion as 21 July 1390 (Teresa de Cartagena, p. 4) although there are doubts as to when exactly it took part. Judith Gale Kreiger, “Pablo de Santa Maria: The Purim Letter and Siete edades del mundo” HaLapid (Fall 1998) online at http://www.cryoptojews.com/pablo_santa_maria. (Seen 19/06/2008). Orae Dominguez “Converts to Catholicism”(2007) online at http://www.nmhcpl.org/ uploads/Converts_ to_Catholicism. (Seen 18/06/2008). Manuel da Costa Fontes, The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain: Rojas and Deliciado (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005) p. 80. Spanish pride verging on arrogance was proverbial, and not just in regard to Old and New Christians. In his autobiography, The History of Henry Brulard, Stendhal speaks many times of his aunt Elizabeth’s espagnolisme which he himself has inherited: “My aunt Elizabeth had the soul of a Spaniard. Her character was the quintessence of honour. She passed this way of feeling on to me in full measure, hence an absurd succession of follies committed out of delicacy and greatness of soul . . . My aunt Elizabeth would still commonly say when she admired something to excess: ‘That’s as fine as the Cid’” (trans. John Sturrock [London: Penguin, 1995] p. 129.)

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Some scholars claim that because of the “infatuation” with Averroes and St Thomas Aquinas which Dominguez senses in the writings of the convert-to-be, the good rabbi of Burgos was not as attached to his ancestral faith as he made out to be and, when the persecutions began, he like many of his ilk, easily made the strategic choice of conversion, with all expected worldly rewards expected of a new prince of the Church. This cynical view would fit with Netanyahu’s claim that the chief rabbi had gradually been turned into a skeptic by all his reading in non-Jewish books.49 Yet this reading of the Greeks (in the rabbinical sense of “Greek knowledge”, which has both a positive and negative connotation), their Arabic commentators, and Catholic disciples was both part of his preparation to confront the growing conversionist tendencies in the Spanish Church and a growing curiosity about the world around him, a European civilization that for the first time since late Antiquity did not seem to Jews totally devoid of merit and intellectual achievement. Before his baptism in his forties, Shlomo Ha-Levi had been respected by the community he served as chief rabbi since 1379, being confirmed in that position by no less than King John I of Castile. He founded an institute of rabbinical scripture studies and wrote letters with his colleagues throughout the Iberian Peninsula and beyond. These intellectual and political proclivities mark his career as within the parameters of Sephardic religious Humanism; in other words, he was open to the wider world of ideas and religious experiences, felt secure within the rationalism of the Maimonidean tradition, and thought he could confront the opposing forces both of the learned challenge by the doctors of the Church and the popular anti-Semitism on the streets. Thus familiarity with non-Jewish sources was not, however, an inevitable pathway to conversion. According to Netanyahu, though, His vast acquaintance with Jewish literature and his mastery of the Jewish sources of law were at least partly responsible for his appointment as chief rabbi of Burgos. But his mastery of Latin brought him also in touch with the anti Jewish Christian authors (from the Church Fathers on), and aware of their arguments against the Jews and Judaism, he could devise counterarguments to refute them . . . Paul [Pablo] used his wide learning, keen mind and debating skill to defend the Jewish faith against its critics. He became known among both Jews and Christians as a formidable advocate of the Jewish cases.50

Another motivation proffered by historians for the shocking turn-about of this leading rabbi is based on features of his personality; for example, according 49 50

Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition, p. 169. Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York: Random House, 1995) p. 168. This book is the main source for data used by other historians, but its opinions are specifically negative and skeptical about the reality of any long-term and communal type of secret Judaism.

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to Judith Gale Kreiger, Ha-Levi was “an ambitious man.” But then Netanyahu goes further in guessing, “Solomon ha-Levi must have fallen in love with the style of life of the Christian aristocracy, just as he must have become an admirer of scholastic and philosophical Christian literature.”51 The “guessing” in that sentence is the operative word here. Two must haves do not necessarily equal proof, and all depends on Netanyahu’s presuppositions about the personality and family pressures on the man from earliest childhood. From his public and pompous ceremony of conversion, it has been further suggested — and these suggestions are themselves only more guesses — that he sought a universal fame possible only to a Christian. If that were so, then Shlomo/Pablo’s behaviour springs from selfish and egotistical reasons. These personality traits, even if true, by the way, do not in themselves explain his abandonment of Judaism, either as an act of bravado, fear, cynicism, or change of heart. There is some evidence that suggests his strategic and public baptism took place after the anti-Jewish riots began, but it is not conclusive and he may have decided to convert before the troubles reached a point of danger to his own person and family. How can we know for sure? Netanyahu imagines a scene in which the grand rabbi of Burgos called together his community to outline the crisis facing them in 1391, a situation so hopeless and dangerous, not just in Castile or in Iberia, but throughout the known world, so far as he was aware. Then this historian goes on to opine, with actually very little evidence at all — in fact, throughout the several paragraphs containing these speculations there is not a single footnote — In any case, he must have stressed the futility of the attempt to adhere to the Jewish faith under current circumstances in Spain, and the terrible consequence that such an adherence would entail for every individual Jew. It does not stand to reason that on that occasion he tried to prove to his perturbed audience that Christianity was superior to Judaism as a religion. He may have pointed out, however, its relentless conquest of one region of the earth after another, and that even the Moslems had to retreat before the invincible might of the cross. In line with this he may have added that the Jews had resisted the pressure of Christianity more than any other people; it is as pity, of course, that all their efforts, their suffering and sacrifices were in vain. But it is time to face reality and case shedding more blood for what experience has proven unattainable. [Italics added]52

Not only is this whole assembly a fabrication of Netanyahu’s imagination, but the speeches by the rabbi and the responses from his congregation are all made up. This is truly superstitio in its root sense of claiming to know in detail and in vivid language about something in the past there is no evidence 51 52

Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition, p. 169. Ibid, pp. 170–171.

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for. Yet by the next section of his account of Paul of Burgos’ life and career, Netanyahu has assimilated his fiction into the history of the Inquisition and the Expulsion of the Jews, so that he begins “Nevertheless, judging by our sources, most notables of the Burgos community accepted Paul’s analysis of the situation and found no solution in their extremity except the one suggested by Paul.”53 In other words, once someone like this historian establishes a matrix from his own biases and presuppositions, he can generate any number of facts, and then build further speculations on them — and, because his study is a big book of nearly 1400 pages with a prestigious press (although not a university press with academic editors to vet it) other historians will follow it as though it were all perfectly true. Our tactic in Marranos on the Moradas is somewhat different, insofar as we develop a series of other options and alternative possibilities, and then seek out a variety of vantage points from which to read the available data, interpret it according to these several possibilities, and finally attempt to pull them together into a tentative conclusion. Hence, we do not accept Netanyahu’s — and the scholars who cite and paraphrase him without question — version of what made Solomon Ha-Cohen convert and become Pablo de Garcia Santa Marcia. As suggested above by Mendez, this maneuver may have been part of a larger plan undertaken by his whole family to try to circumvent the persecutions looming throughout the Peninsula and their expected consequences.54 The move was made, in concert with others, to take advantage of a political and commercial alliance with some important Catholic families to influence the course of Spanish, and perhaps world history in ways that were, to him at least, more mystical than political. In brief, it was not a decision of one man only to escape persecution or to climb the social or political ladder. In fact, from Netanyahu’s detailed and copious notes to the career of this rabbi turned bishop we can see that there must have been more than personal charisma, charm and persuasiveness in his demeanor. “Paul must also have been a great diplomat, ingenious deviser of solutions to hard problems, and besides, he must have had the appearance and deportment of a great personage” (italics added).55 And yet all these speculations and guesses add up, in my view, to a counter-reading of his career, namely, one in which there are behind-the-scenes maneuvers by his relatives and allies, political machinations undertaken by third parties to affect the decisions the pope, the king, and other authorities would do. In fact, given the direction in which royal policy turned, and Pablo’s own attitude displayed 53 54

55

Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition, p. 171. Much of the evidence that Mendez analyzes and interprets derives from El Cronista Alonso de Palencia edited by Antonio Paz y Méla in 1914 for the Hispanic Society of America in Madrid and recently reprinted in facsimile by Elibron Classics (n.p.: Adamant Medias Corporation, 2006) Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition, p. 174.

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in his Christian writing, there was a terrible reversal of any intentions made to use his advancement and educational attainments to further the interests of the Jews and protect the New Christians. According to Netanyahu, Pablo “was a crafty schemer”,56 but I think the evidence shows that he was confused, became frightened of the monster let loose in the kingdom — an enormous number of superficially and probably insincerely converted Jews — and went mad, insane in the sense of being a rabid self-hating former Jew. “In his Scrutuarium Scripturarum, he defines them [the Jews] as criminals and justifies the massacres of 1391 as divine punishment.”57 One did not have to suffer torture or its threat in the secret cells and tunnels of the Inquisition to be driven our of one’s mind as happened too often to those former Jews suspected of judaizing — Erat locus subterraneus satis amplus . . . 58 — for it could just as well happen to someone like the Bishop of Burgos supposedly happy, smugly so, in his rich and powerful place in Christian Spain, when all the while, within himself, as he realized — deep within himself, where perhaps only guilt could reach — the experiment had gone wrong and all he could do to keep from self-destruction was to project his uncleanness on to his former co-religionists. Ironically, too, what the former rabbi wrote about the superiority of Christianity — and he could write with an appearance of an insider’s knowledge of the Talmud and other rabbinical writings — convinced other Jews wavering and full of fearful doubts, men like Isaac Orobio de Castro, or at least what Isaac told the inquisitors who were torturing him. “He gave the credit for his restoration to faith in Christianity to Pablo de Santa María, the well-known converted Jew of Burgos, with whose writings he was, in fact, familiar.” But this confession itself might be faked, in the sense that after three years of imprisonment and constant harassment, “and whilst under arrest [he] went out of his mind” (er iz . . . bald narrsch un meschugge geworn . . . ).59 It may very well be that whilst the tortures of the Holy Office pushed poor Orobio over the limits of reason, what really started him on the road to being a mishuggenah was his reading of Shlomo/Pablo’s books. For in his letters written about these texts by the renegade Santa María, Orobio asks, “How can we demonstrate the distortions which this enemy of ours produces?”60 For the 56 57

58

59 60

Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition, p. 183. Da Costa Fontes, The Art of Subversion, p. 282, n. 1, following Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition, pp. 199–200. Unfortunately, unless one is very careful, “facts” like this recorded by historians tend to go back to Netanyahu and his own fabrications. We find this line evidence not of a wicked, evil intent, but of a confused man gone crazy. Philip van Limborch cited in Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro, trans Raphael Loewe (Oxford and Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1989), p. 87, n. 34. Ibid. Ibid, p. 114.

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arguments seem convincing, while at the same time they also seem all wrong. In his efforts to return to Judaism and understand the nature of rabbinics, Orobio read all he could find available and consulted with many rabbis in person and by letter; in the same way, he investigated the new Christian doctrines of Protestantism and surveyed the arguments of the Catholic apologists as thoroughly as he could. He was no fool, but he had grown up within a Christian world, cut off from almost all Jewish culture and learning. That means that Orobio, when he returned nominally to Judaism in the west, was already a grown man, and was not trained enough in Jewish Law and rabbinical disputation to be able to follow the subtleties of Pablo’s method, nor could he distinguish fact from fancy, supposed midrash from ecclesiastical commentary or misinterpretation; and, thus, because Orobio, like other New Christians seeking a way to return to Judaism but also looking for justification to stay within or return to Christianity after a flirtation with what had become for them a totally unfamiliar religion, the arguments in Pablo were not just subtle or arcane but a kind of madness they were no longer capable of recognizing — because they were under pressure, unsure of their abilities, and well on the way to madness themselves.61 Yosef Kaplan speaks of this highly charged mental condition as “spiritual anguish.”62 There may be more to this condition than such existential or intellectual anguish. Madness can serve as a mask, when the person involved seeks to hide his or her true identity, as Brutus did biding his time during the dictatorship of the Tarquins, as Hamlet did when he claimed to be mad only “north by north-west”, and as Don Quixote did when he descended into the Cave of Montesinos.63 This former chief rabbi of Burgos attended the universities in Salamanca and Paris, studied with and served the papal court in Avignon, and in 1401, after several years as archdeacon in Burgos, was elevated to the post of Bishop of Cartagena. He clearly did more than advance quickly through the ranks of the Church that had opened to him as a convert. He also gained access to important influential persons and institutions. Then from 1404 through 141864 he wrote Las Siete Edades del mundo, a History of the Seven Ages of the World which integrated early Spanish history to the narrative of the Hebrew Bible, particularly in regard to names and chronology which were adjusted to create an appearance of consistency and coherence. This is, as we shall see later, an example of the midrashing of Spanish history.

61 62 63

64

See Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism, pp. 115–116 and n. 20. Ibid, p. 116. See more discussion on this topic in the fourth chapter of Norman Simms, Masks in the Mirror. The final version of this “long historico-allegorical poem” was only dedicated in 1430. See “Pablo Garcia de Santa Maria” online at http://www.allbiographies.com/biographyPabloGarciadeSantaMaria-43280.

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As Nader puts it, “This shift of emphases from classical myth to Old Testament history, from the Romans to the Goths, and from Roman province to Castilian nation became one of the distinguishing characteristics of the letrado treatment of Spanish history.”65 From the Jewish perspective, what the former rabbinical authority was doing was midrashing Spanish history, actively transforming the present and the past into a consistent and coherent whole. This kind of midrash, which is not only a dynamic reproduction of the textual phenomena historically developed in rabbinic writings both during and following the consolidation of Scriptures (TaNaKh), but most significantly for our purposes: “to create a new text by the re-utilization, actualization, numeralization . . . in a word: by elaboration and, if possible, saturation.”66 Each of these terms may be expanded slightly here, preliminary to later discussions in the course of this book: 4. Re-utilization In simple (simplistic) terms, this may be considered a reduction of textual diversity by drawing into one single web of associations many diverse persons, places, things and events by word-play, visual similarity, and process analogies, thus superimposing on one another of all scenarios and arguments; but then, in a more sophisticated way, of forcing each separate text thus brought into the associative network to interact with the others and manifest the uniqueness of their radical expansion of original, unrealized potentiality. 5. Actualization This is the transformation of a rabbinical trope into an active historical set of actions; this can happen in at least two ways, either by shaping one’s decisions, choices, and acts into a programme based on the models abstracted from these rabbinical documents themselves, as adjusted to actual circumstances; or by re-interpreting the past along those midrashic lines, and thus establishing precedents, justification and guidelines for future behaviour. 6. Numeralization This is usually known as gematria, the reading of textual letters as ciphers, whose numerical equivalences may be played with in order to create or reveal connections, analogies, and replacements of words, phrases and passages, thus exposing the consolidated texts of Scripture and its ancillary commentaries as a unified, ever-expanding whole. 7. Elaboration By elaboration is meant an extensive out-flowing of lines seeking to connect with other similar — similar-sounding words, similar-seeming 65 66

Nader, The Mendoza Family pp. 21–22. Anonymous, “Midrash et peinture: analyse d’une chute de cheval” Le Champ du Midrash at http://www.lechampdumidrash.et/articles.php?lng=fr&pg=222.

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images, and similarly developed themes and events (process analogies); like neurons in their arboration throughout the developing brain, both stimulated and inhibited by the infant-mother gaze, these growths form the patterns that create the matrix of consciousness, both affective and cognitive. These connectivities are filled loops, back-formations, overdeterminations, etc. 8. Saturation This act seems very close to the satiric act of supersatuation, that is, overfilling the text with people, places, things and events. Whereas satura proper creates comic, grotesque and farcical effects by bursting the seams of conventional genre and social institutions, thus revealing what is hidden inside them for the purpose of exposing them to ridicule and undermining their authority and influence, the saturation of the midrash indicates the pleuroma of sacred power, the condensation into one artificially-constructed scene the normally hidden connections and commonalities between historical moments and eternal verities. But it was certainly not within the moral parameters of talmudic discourse and fits rather with what is called “satanic midrashing.”67 As such, this synthesizing of Hebrew, Christian and classical history seems to push Judaism to the margins, establish Christianity as the triumphant, replacement religion, and assign Spanish history a leading role, concluding “with a depiction of John II as the political redeemer of Castile,” as Krieger puts it. However, tempting as it is to take the “lifelessness” of this Latin poem to be proof of the desiccated soul of its author who, like so many other Jews, was forced to convert at the end of the fifteenth century, which is what Krieger does, comparing it with the lively and witty one remaining work in Hebrew by the New Christian author when he was still rabbi of Burgos, does not hold up to more careful scrutiny either of the poem or of the man — nor of the times. What for modern Jews who long for proof that conversion was a tragic affair and imposed by horrible state and ecclesiastical power may not have been the case at all. Ha-Levi may have longed for an opportunity to pursue his intellectual interests in the universities and church courts closed to him as a Jew, and even have found in the kind of Christianity resonant with Renaissance glory quite acceptable if not more to his personal liking. Edades del mundo, rather than being dull and boring, seems to have been enjoyed as an exciting new perspective on the history of the world and was clearly influential to Pablo de Santa Maria’s new co-religionists. Rather than either cynicism or despair, the motivations for his conversion may have been positive and calculated, and not just individual but collective, part of the 67

Norman Simms “Satanic Midrashim: or, The Abuse of History” Mentalities/Mentalités 21:1 (2007) 32–47.

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strategic plan set out before.68 He was, in effect, we would now say, midrashing himself. Unfortunately, as we said a little ago, these plans had gone awry, his intentions turned sour, and his mind crossed over into vicious self-hatred. Thus, when Netanyahu asks, “Was Paul of Burgos morally capable of subjecting the Jews to such hardships and suffering, which were sure to doom many of them to death?” the only answer he can give is a clear affirmative. In Scrutinium Scriptorium the argument moves from an intellectual one, that Christianity can be proved correct from reading Hebrew Scriptures, to one of sheer toxicity: “he defines the Jews as greater criminals than the people of Sodom, worse than the rebels Dathan and Aviram, who were justly destroyed in a single moment when they were devoured by the earth.”69 In addition, Pablo de Santa Maria’s second son, don Alfonso de Cartagena also developed a similar midrashic programme. On the one hand, he was “the spiritual leader of the conversos of Castile and their most famous spokesman.” He too was a Bishop of Burgos and thus a leading figure within the ecclesiastical establishment, but a renegade to his anti-Jewish enemies, then and now, a “plant” or “mole” within the establishment. On the other hand, he was a respected jurist, historian, philosopher and theologian, to his Christian admirers, so that what he wrote made an impact way beyond any immediate effect on the New Christian community left in Spain. Orae Dominguez claims that he was a “through and through” Catholic in all ways — personal, cultural and religious. “He had an enormous influence on Castilian historiography,” says Nader, “because he took into his household and educated a number of famous clerics who later became officials in the court of the Castilian Monarchs.”70 The poet Gómez Manrique, in assessing Don Alonso as a teacher of Catholic doctrine, defines him as another St. Paul,” and says that “it is well known that, as far as learning is concerned, no one could be found equal to him since the days of St. Gregory”.71

This exaggerated praise at best can alert us to the apparent smoothness by which a New Christian can be integrated or assimilated into the Catholic contraption, but not necessarily that Don Alonso was completely detached from his 68

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This indeed is what Arye Hazary does depending on Netanyahu’s study of “Paul of Burgosargues in response to Krieger’s essay Arye Hazarye, “Another Look at Solomon Halevy/Pablo de Santa Maria” Halapid on line at http://www.cryptojew.om/another_ look_at_solomon_halevy. (Seen 19/06/2008) Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition, p. 199. Nader, The Mendoza Family, p. 22. Dominguez is here citing Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition, and it is difficult to tease apart the insights of the commentator from the fabrications of the historian.

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Sephardic roots and its traditional penchant for the philosophy of Maimonides.72 Don Alonso gave a speech entitled Anacephaleosis that had enduring influence on subsequent Spanish ways of conceiving of themselves in the world. “He assumed that the natural political order was a divinely ordained hierarchy and that the order of command descended from God to pope to emperor, thence to the kings in chronological order of acquiescence to the divine will.”73 In general terms of the style of the Baroque era, as Kaplan suggests, this attitude of mind was associated with the cult of disengagno and the popularity of Renaissance Stocisim.74 In term of political theory and historiography, this extreme monarchism became the standard of royal propaganda from the middle of the sixteenth century, with the kings not only ruling the state with absolute divine authority but also the Church through the Inquisition. Though not all the historians and apologists for the political philosophy of the letrados were of New Christian stock, a disproportionately large number were, and we can thus see how, contrary to their own best wishes, the plans to protect themselves within an apparatus that would enhance the status and influence the allied families, such as the Carjavals and Santa Marias, backfired, at least so far as the former Jews were concerned. Their educational achievements and their rise through the hierarchies of state, city, church, military orders and colonial administration came at a terrible price: part of this price was the creation of a monster, a contraption of persecution, intolerance, and tyranny; the other part, no less confusing for its members who were also its victims, was the creation of a counter-contraption, as it confounded the rationalist ideals of Maimonides — his tolerance, his openness to good ideas from the non-Jewish world, and his insistence on excellence in scholarly discourse — with the aspirations of the caballeros and other adventurers who set forth to conquer the New World, win great wealth for their families, and change the face of Spain and its Empire to reflect their glory. This last set of ideals failed miserably, too, because it was too quixotic and could lead only to madness, the madness of autistic withdrawal into dreams and delusions, the madness of paranoid fears of constant persecution which in turn led to more escapes from society and reality, and the madness of identifying with the persecuting other — to going beyond 72

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Ben-Sasson in “Maimonidean Controversy” claims even further, “ . . . the Maimonidean camp [i]ncreasingly . . . inclined toward extreme allegorical explanations of talmudic and even biblical expressions and tales. Their opponents accused them of even inclining to explain away as no more than symbols certain practical commandments, which need be fulfilled only by simple men, but not by educated people. The rationalists denied this. Social overtones became stronger. The anti-Maimonideans berated their upper-class opponents for their hedonistic, luxurious and sinful way of life. The Maimonideans countered by accusing their adversaries with [sic] anarchy, harshness, ignorance, simplicity of mind, and of being under Christian influence.” Nader, The Mendoza Family, p. 22. Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism, p. 177, n. 209.

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acceptance of the Christian scheme of salvation, belief in the sacraments, especially the Eucharistic transubstantiation of wine into blood and bread into the body of the Crucified Jesus, to a re-enactment of the sufferings on the Cross, no longer a representational image or a symbolic act, outside the jurisdiction of priests and in a wilderness without altars and liturgy; an embodiment into the self of the bloody sacrifice itself. One way of identifying with the enemy can be seen in Pablo de Burgos and his son Alonso, both of whom the Catholic Encyclopedia lists among the most distinguished princes of the Church the city of Burgos ever produced, both of them credited for their anti-Jewish polemics.75 The other way is in the performances of the Penitentes.

SPACELESS SPACE AND TIMELESS TIME Psychologists claim that between ¼ to ⅓ of Jews are so emotionally traumatized by centuries of persecution and discrimination that they reject their own heritage and immerse themselves instead in the culture and problems of other people, even when the latter groups vehemently reject them and pour scorn and abject hatred upon them. — Irving Kett76 Thus, in a spaceless space and in timeless time, compelled by the concentration of precise words, truth is revealed to the small child . . . Light illuminates the balcony, but a seal of silence has been imposed . . . In 1492, when the Expulsion Edict against Sephardic Jews was issued, her family did not go into exile, but rather stayed and was forced to convert into Christianity, increasing the ranks of Crypto-Jews, also called Marranos, Conversos or New Christians. — Angelina Muñiz-Huberman77

The role of the Inquisition is central to the study of the Penitentes, not because these scattered and secretive brotherhoods were ever directly affected by the operation of the Holy Office in Mexico City or Monterrey during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, nor because there was a constant pressure by the 75

76

77

Tirso López, “Burgos”, Catholic Encyclopedia (1996–2008) online at http://www.catholicity. con/encyclopedia/b/burgos. Irving Kett, “How Secure are Jews in the Contemporary World?”(16 June 2008) online at http://cnpublications.net/soo8/06/17/maintaining-jewish-security/#morte-974. Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, “The Girl in the Balcony” Halapid 15:3 (Summer 2008) 4.

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Church to purge itself of Judaizing heretics in the northern territories of the Nueva España.78 The position of the Mexican Inquisition was central in the sense that it was the main device of the imperial order that caused there to be a counter-contraption set up to protect New Christians, a complex, unwieldy apparatus that often did not function properly but which over several centuries did reshape the mentality of individuals, families and whole communities in those parts of the Vice-Royalty that eventually became the southwestern states of America. Like the Holy Office itself, or the “rabbinate,” representing the formal, legal community of Jews, the other cultural phenomenon that went under the name of “the nation” when it gave itself a name at all, functioned by clandestine means, through subterfuge and deception. Though the counter-contraption could, at its best, and usually in Spain itself, prove to be a remarkable alliance of New and Old Christian families providing one another mutual assistance and protection and generating new modes of knowledge, influence and spiritual insight, more often, as happened in the colonies of South and Central America, it could not sustain the harmonious conviviencia idealized by the noblest, most educated members. As we shall see, the grand apparatus of trade, industry, education, governance, military power and ecclesiastical influence faltered, and survived by two barely perceptible means: on the one hand, where social and geographical mobility remained possible, members of el naçio interacted intermittently with each other across national, ethnic, confessional and linguistic borders, sharing where and when they could information, power, and memories; on the other hand, when small groups became isolated from each other and could only rarely touch base with distant relatives, colleagues or trusted coreligionists, they survived as small enclaves, generation by generation growing smaller, losing their specific memories of previous community and identity through historical suffering, and remaining uncomfortable in their treasured and sanctified but rather vague and indeterminate otherness. This process of separating out by escape or marginalization was probably the only one way in which the New Christians could remain relatively integral and self-identifying. The other way, perhaps more common — and yet, at the same time, more vulnerable to erosion and deteriorization (atomization) — was through an almost constant movement from place to place, in and out of contact with any recognizable Jewish communities or at least able to touch base, as it were, with representatives of such more legally and traditionally constituted communities. This distinction is described by César Ayala Casás.79 In his own 78

79

Yolanda Mariel de Ibáñez, La Inquisición en México durante el siglo xvi (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1946) p. 15. César Ayala Casás, “The Jewish Memory and the Catholic ‘Forgettery’: Report from an Undocumented Jew” Halapid (Summer 2005) based on a talk to the Conference of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, Portland, OR, 8–10 August 2004 online at http:// cryptojews.com/remembering_Ayala_Casas (seen 29/05/2008).

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family, Casás notes “a history of extensive migration and travel” in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. “I would like to suggest that an outlook which focuses on Marrano/Jewish interactions might be more productive than the focus on remnants of the tradition in isolation.” Yet this different focus does not mean that there is a strict dichotomy between types of experience for individuals and families. Indeed, he argues that, alluding to the objections made by Judith Neulander (one of the prime skeptics whom we discussed in Chapter I) to the claims of an enclaved remnant of secret Jews with her prime instance the identification of a noise-making top used in local Hispanic rituals such as the Penitentes as a dreidel if we look at the process of the Crypto-Jews of the Southwest as one more example in a long chain of converso/Jewish interactions, then the adoption by the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico of Ashkenazi artifacts becomes not a pathological act of “falsification” of a heritage, but rather a normative attempt to reconstruct Jewish identity through adaptation of artifacts from communities that have had a better chance of preserving their traditions.

There are so many difficulties here it is hard to know where to begin, even well into our third chapter. Not least of the problems is the confusion of Judaism (in some essentialist sense) with two other large categories we have set forth — the tensions between Ashkenazi traditions dominant in modern America and the Sephardi traditions prevalent in Hispanic lands, and the subtle, unsteady, overlapping sets of New Christians, Crypto-Jews, anousim, Marranos and Judaizers. There is no space even in a long book to write out all the differences between Yiddish-speaking Jewry and Spanish-Portuguesespeaking Jewry, but we can briefly cite one crucial cluster of distinctions expounded by Zvi Zohar: Ashkenazic poseqim [Talmudic decision makers] and rabbinic leaders in modern times were (and are) operating under two remarkable constrictions, unaccepted by their Sephardic peers. First is the notion of “hadash asur min ha-Torah” — Torah prohibits the new . . . The ideology it represents crippled much Ashkenzaic pasaq by denying recourse to the potential for organic growth and change indigenous to traditional halachic thinking. Add to this the notion of “kol ha-mahmir tavo alav berakhah” — better always to adopt the more stringent position . . . Compare this to the Sephardic motto . . . ”koha de-hetera adif” — the power of leniency is greater (and, thus, to be preferred)!80

This set of distinctions takes us back to the contrast between Ramban and Rambam. Probably without being aware of these major contentions within 80

Zvi Zohar, A Review of Rabbi Marc D. Angel, Loving Truth and Peace: The Grand Religious Worldview of Rabbi Benzion Uziel in The Edah Journal 1:2 (2001) 1.

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Judaism, the historians and sociologists, as well as the Jewish community leaders who disparage the Hispanic claimants to be the inheritors of the Sephardic settlers who went underground in northern Mexico at the end of the sixteenth century seem to be taking the stringent, closed position of pilpul. Consequently, rather than Neulander’s “contaminated evidence” based on a so-called Orientalized primitive group, this dreidel and similar indicators of Jewishness — six-pointed stars on gravestones, habits such as sweeping the house from the outside towards the center of the room, and attitudes of mind, such as anti-clericalism — César Ayala Casás suggests this other process of adoption and adaptation. This is an example, he also claims, of preserving memories through the “mediation” of present circumstances. It is also a product of “making things new” and understanding the cultural practices of enforced bricolage from the point of view of leniency. This adaptation or “accommodation” (to anticipate a term from Amos Funkenstein) of fleetingly seen or heard Jewishness need not be a thoroughly conscious activity, but like assimilation itself something that occurs in the search for comfort, normality, and resolution to all the anxieties and tensions in the affected persons’ lives. It is also something, which can happen to these insignificant numbers of individuals, and families who still circulate off the radar screen and were even in the past “[b]elow a certain threshold of police activity by the Inquisition.”

NEW MODELS OF BEHAVIOR AND SOCIAL DECEPTION Decepisti me, Jehova, et deceptus sum; vim intulistis mihi, itfuisti superior; fui in ludibrium toto die (vel, quotidie, hoc est, assidue;) omnes subsannant me. O Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived; thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed; I am in derision daily, everyone mocketh me. Jeremiah 20:781

The Spanish and later the Portuguese Santo Officio is not just another political institution used to control the rising urban and international bourgeoisie and its interests for the protection of the crown and the old landed aristocracy, although it was certainly that; but it was also a physical place in society or a set of buildings, with procedures and protocols that made it distinct from all other 81

Translation and Latin text in Christian Classics Ethereal Library at file: Jeremiah 2–7 online at BibleStudy.org (21 May 2008).

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police, control, and incarcerating purposes. In the contemporary terms of the sixteenth century, the Holy Office was a monster, in the same sense that Hobbes conceived of the state as a Leviathan, the great sea creature that Job speaks of along with Behemoth, and which the rabbis sometimes thought of as a huge fish whose carcass, at the end of times, would provide an endless banquet for those lucky souls enjoying Heaven. But the Inquisition was no gefilte fish platter served to angels and rabbis nor even a strict but necessary bureaucratic state dispensing justice to Noahides and followers of Moses. It was an instrument to collect and create information, to collate and interpret this information over long periods of time, and to use this information for a variety of purposes. Samuel Usque has his narrator in Consolaçam as tribulaçiones de Israel (first published in Ferrara in 1553 under the patronage of Doña Gracia Nasi) describe this terrifying creature as a monster set loose to frighten and devour the New Christians in Spain. The beast — Job’s behemoth and/or leviathan — sneaks up on the unwary conversos who mistakenly felt safe within the bosom of the tolerant old Mother Church of their dreams: They turned their power against the Jews who were already within the Christian fold. As confesos, they were no longer recognized as Jews, and their minds were at ease and their hearts secure, since they were Christians. The king and queen [Ferdinand and Isabella] sent to Rome for a wild monster, of such strange form and horrible mien that all Europe trembles at the mere mention of its name. Its body, an amalgam of hard iron and deadly poison, has an adamantine shell made of steel and covered with enormous scales. It rises in the air on a thousand wings with black and poisonous pinions, and it moves on the ground with a thousand pernicious and destructive feet. Its form is like both the awesome lion’s and the frightful serpent’s in the deserts of Africa. Its enormous teeth equal those of the most powerful elephants. Its whistle or voice kills even more quickly than the venomous basilisk. Its eyes and mouth spew continual flames and blazes of consuming fire, and the food it eats is fire in which human bodies burn.82

Usque continues the passionate and vivid midrash by recounting the monster’s flight to Egypt where, “in its wake it leaves a darkness like the darkness visited upon the Egyptians in one of the plagues” and where it then “desolates the entire countryside with its poison”. The heavy metallic creature, with its venomous fires, destroys the shocked Jewish converts, trampling their corpses and their reputations into the dust. 82

Samuel Usque, Consolation for the Truibulations of Israel (Consolaçam as tribulaçiones de Israel), trans. Martin A. Cohen (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 5737/1977) p. 198.

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With its mouth and powerful teeth it wrecked and swallowed all of their worldly riches and gold. With its massive, poison-laden feet, it trampled their renown and their greatness, and with its awesome and misshapen countenance it disfigured and marred comely faces [which were forced to gaze upon it], and darkened hearts and souls with its flight. And it still continues its vile deeds in Spain, against the limbs which were severed from my body. And though my children are parading their Christianity, it does not save their lives. (Translator’s insertions)83

Usque uses the apocryphal and apocalyptic language of Scriptures and midrash to concoct this image of the hated Inquisition. But more fitting for the age of the Renaissance and its New Science and technologies, we have put in its place the figure of the contraption, the unwieldy and yet still deadly machine. This was probably the first modern bureaucratic and authoritarian state apparatus, and like its more recent progeny it had its public shows of faith, though not show trials, and it served to decide who was sane or insane and set up a factory to process the madness and its even madder asylums, nurses and doctors. At the same time, however, the Holy Office — predecessor of our own contemporary The Office — was a model of depth psychology, talking cures, and therapeutic re-education, managed care, and institutionalized supervision. This Christian machinery of persecution and ethnic cleansing must, however, be seen eventually in relation to another counter-contraption that develops in response to the operations of the Inquisition, and which creates itself not so much as a mirrored reflection or refraction of that open-secret Holy Office with its associated cells, tunnels and spy-holes, and all the informants, familiars and investigators, but as an instrument of protection, defense, and counter-action. In a cross between cinematic versions of Allied prisonerof-war camps where clever officers and witty enlisted men out-maneuver dumbkopf Nazis, Fascists and collaborators to create elaborate escape tunnels, counterfeiting plots, and spy-networks and of intellectuals incarcerated in the endless Gulags of the Soviet Empire producing reams of samizdat literature, forming intricate networks of coded communications to each other, distant camps, and people in the cuckoo’s nest without, so the persons denounced to the Inquisition developed their own contraption-within-a-contraption to counter the ecclesiastical and state forces arrayed against them. Unlike the eighteenth-century panopticon (pace Foucault) that serves as the model all-seeing prison for the dominant middle-class state, however, the Holy Office of the Inquisition claims not so much to punish public wrong-doing and religious wrong-thinking as to correct them, convince the perpetrator-victims of their errors, and then return them to conformity with dogma established by the Church in cooperation with the Catholic Monarchy. This inquisitorial organization also seeks to discover the hidden dimensions of the motives for wrong-doing, so 83

Usque, Consolation, p. 199.

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that it engages itself with private domestic matters, intimate relationships, and thoughts and feelings, not as confessed or merely as denounced, but as discovered and invented. Unlike a modern police force whose ostensible aim is to protect society from acts of violence, to detect fraud and criminal negligence, and so occasionally involve undercover work and the use of agents-provocateurs to root out secret conspiracies, the Holy Office investigates what in modern liberal society is considered the special realm of the individual: the private and the personal. In opposition to this apparatus of surveillance and insult, those persons suspected by and denounced to the Holy Office make all efforts to disguise/ dissimulate themselves, create new kinds of coded information, and communicate an anamorphotic image of themselves and society, their own hidden place in the distorted image of the dominant, hegemonic state as conceived/perceived by the guardians of the hegemonic perspective. Anamorphosis is the technique by which artists extend the lines of perspective so far as to distort images beyond natural recognition, creating an optical illusion or trompe l’oeil, a visual trick that can be un-played by the use of curled-up mirrors and devices to revolve, twist and reverse normal perception. It is a gimmick common to the Baroque imagination, part of its ingenious, witty and shocking technology of seeing-anew. The contraption traps the unwary viewer or listener or participant into believing superficial impressions are true. Not only does this confounded machine-for-seeing contra operate by dissimulation, hiding what it does not want to be revealed, but by simulation, creating a false perception of another reality or identity altogether. These deceptions and deferences or deferrals belong to a much more complex process of self-deconstruction that goes on in the mock antiinquisitorial technology of the always-suspected Judaizers who often chose to remain or to return in the Lands of Idolatry (the realm of the panopt/iconic Holy Office) for a variety of reasons, not least of which was the thrilling fear of teasing the inquisitors in a game of cat-and-mouse. As contemporary kinky and kabbalistic Jewish poet Adeena Karasick said recently in an online interview with Nada Gordon, almost grasping the sparks of light dancing through the historical narrative: . . . just as Jews historically had to often conceal their identity (((which last year when i was living in Cairo, became a really prominent trope for me))) i started to call my work “marranic” (from the Spanish Marranos), [[[incidentally Marrano (Spanish for “pig”, “swine” or “filthy one”) was the pejorative term applied in Spain and Portugal to further humiliate the Jews who were forcefully baptized. Similar to the Arabic “mahram” (forbidden), and the Hebrew “He-ReM” (banned), it literally means “one who pretends to convert”]]].84 84

Nada Gordon, “Adeena Karasick Interview” no date, online at http://www.library. utoronto.ca/canpoetry/karasick. index (Read 19/05/2008). The strange punctuation here belongs to the author and her editor.

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Peculiar as Karasick’s explanations are — and she misses such points, as that the insulting term Marrano was as often applied by practicing Jews who remained loyal to their faith, as well as by jealous Old Christians, and was often the official term for neophyte or converso in Spanish-occupied Italy. But this quirky style, which the poet attributes to Kabbalah, especially of the Abulafian variety, points to a bizarre aspect to the whole Marranic experience usually overlooked by serious professional scholars. Of her poetry, with greater insight, she writes: Mimicking a Midrashic methodology of script in dialogue, in conflict, it celebrates language as always already a heteroglossic process-always in the process of becoming . . . I’m particularly interested in notions of revealment and concealment — and find it fascinating how historically Kabbalah was seen as a “secret” discourse — not available to women, and certainly not available to young secular Jewish women. With this said, I think it’s necessary to re-view the notion of what’s historically or normatively seen as “secret” as that which can not be possessed, contained or understood, so a lot of my recent work plays in the hiatus between what’s manifest, divided, what’s common or contaminated, impropre, propre, appropriated, private and public.

To unpack such terse (turgid) and cryptic (confused) writing is not easy, but it does pay off, in that it leads us to reframe the basic historical and historiographical questions needed to grasp our topic, the Marranos hidden on the Moradas of the Penitentes. It is not merely that she recalls the dialogic structures (pace Bakhtin) of midrash, as a way of articulating rabbinic discourse across generational and geographical space, to keep explications of difficult and secret places in sacred writing constantly in a state of exploding new meanings, and thus maintaining and monitoring the flow of revelation. It is also that midrashic dialogue is different: it is not polite, formalistic, or allegorical, that is, it does not seek to harmonize its own differences to accommodate an overarching single truth, but to keep the differences alive and growing in developing historical circumstances — and to affect those circumstances and harness their energies within a continuing adherence to the Law.85 The heteroglossia (another term from Bakhtin) can only be seen as proceeding in a carnival procession, where each interlocutor wears a different mask or persona, speaking with appropriate tonalities and alluding to culturally acceptable codes of reference, but rather that the rabbinical authorities seek to using a variety of prior voices, each of which embodies specific historical concerns, none of which is ever fully left behind as irrelevant or transcended, thus forever challenging each other and themselves to question the past and the present as fixed natural, inevitable or logical consequences of a primary argument, and seeking to make 85

See here Maurice Magui on “Origines du carnaval” in “Genèse de la passion” at Le Champ du Midrash extracted from his Comprendre les origines du Christianisme.

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the cacophony creative — creatively moral, ethical, and pertinent to a present that is open-ended. Among the other insights in this passage from Karasick, aperçus that we will keep pursuing, there are those odd terms, impropre and propre, as though she were confounding French and English senses, of the unclean and the inappropriate, along with what is appropriated, taken legally or illegally, expropriated, confiscated, stolen, misappropriated, as well the clean and the appropriate, the trayf and the kosher, hametz and matzoh.86 The secret and the silent, the hidden and the hoarded, the simulated and the dissimulated — all these nuanced conditions of being wriggle their way between conventional dichotomies used to explain the phenomena of Crypto-Judaism and Marranism. The search for Jewish relics by local historians, anthropologists and folklorists, still locked in their Incidentalist viewing-machines, improperly follows the trail of the inquisitors searching for judaizing acts and sayings. For it is not in uncontextualized objects, signs and words that the processes of historical identity can be measured and evaluated. Later we will argue this point more nicely. However, for those who know the deep identification of Fraud’s Interpretation of Dreams and the strategies of midrash, the exploration and enhancement of seemingly trivial or incidental — that is, supposedly “meaningless” — details is the very essence of the enterprise. Still further in Adeena Karasick’s interview with Nada Gordon in Toronto, the Jewish poet breaks apart the surface textures of historical normality and common sense to nudge us further into the complexities and ambiguities of Marranic discourse. For she says that after her time in Cairo, where she saw first hand the way Jews had to hide their ritual celebrations and practices of common household mitzvoth, her own poetry shifted in its trajectory. So here i was as a Jew living in this space. it’s my mom’s yahrzeit [annual memorial] I want to light a candle, go to Synagogue, it’s Hanukkah, I want to light a menorah, and there are no synagogue’s [sic] left, there are no menorah’s [sic] to be had, let alone yahrzeit candles. And i am warned to conceal my identity at all costs. And thinking this is what it was like for those Jews of the 13th C. living in secret.87 86

87

Trayf refers to food that is ritually unclean, by virtue of its essence or its relationship: pig and shellfish are unclean in themselves, milk and meat cannot be eaten together; kosher refers to foods that are clean in themselves, provided they are properly slaughtered, prepared and served. Hametz is leavened bread and its uses in other prepared dishes that are forbidden during Passover; matzoh is unleavened bread and what is produced with it commanded to celebrate the holiday memorializing the Exodus from Egypt when the Children of Israel had no time to prepare leavening for their baking. Passover dovetails with the spring festival of the new year’s harvest when there is a liminal period between the fresh grains and the forbidden use of the old year’s fermented crop for leavening. The author’s dating here seems at first blush to be inaccurate: the mass conversions that followed the pogroms of 1390 would mark the development of Kol Nidre at least two

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Conducting passover seders in crypts, hidden attics, underground tunnels. Inhabiting a syncretic space, both a part of and a part from colonial tyranny, condemned to a life of masquerade, simulation, mimicry . . . So, out comes a writing of vagrancy, migrancy, middles, madness and monstrosity.88

But provocative as this all is, the poet does not go far enough. We need to tease apart her quintet of terms because each one is vibrating with a power bursting to explode: vagrancy, migrancy, middles, madness and monstrosity. We also have to discuss what she means by a syncretic space, as well as a life of masquerade, simulation, mimicry. Though these words may easily slide into post-modernistic jargon, the poetic author is firmly rooted in her own historical experience as a Jew to keep herself on a relatively even keel and above board. What was hidden from Sephardic women in the culture prior to conversion was only a masculine version of Jewish mysticism. Women already knew and practiced the arts associated with hygiene and health, nurturance, pregnancy and birthing, childcare and education, sexual politics and other domestic and communal activities. Women were called on to tell fortunes, interpret dreams, prepare love potions, and manage fashions, styles and production of clothing, furniture, and décor. Whereas men had to engage in more public shows of machismo and loyalty to Church and State, women could stay at home or visit other homes, shielded from most intruding eyes. But while male vigilance was alert to familiars of the Inquisition and the malsines, female caution was aroused to the polillos. But before we turn to the specifics of the Penitentes of the southwestern United States, we need to look at several terms used by Karasick. Some of them we have already touched upon in the first two chapters and will deal with at greater length throughout the remainder of this book. Some have been hinted at in my last two books, Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience and Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice, but now need to be focused on more sharply, redefined and recontextualized. • Vagrancy Movement from place to place in an undisciplined manner, as though wandering aimlessly, but always aimed at avoiding denunciations and

88

hundred years later. But in fact the sacred disavowal of “all vows” does indeed originate much earlier than the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and this signals two key factors about Crypto-Judaism and Marranism in Iberian tradition: (a) persecutions occurred often throughout Spanish history forcing Jews to take the dangerous step of conversion for strategic purposes again and again and (b) the historical depth of a secret Jewish-converso tradition as continuing as both an option in times of crisis or as an alternative way of being Jewish in Spanish civilization presents itself as something more than a unique response to the persecutions and massacres of the later period. The eccentric capitalization, punctuation, etc. belongs to the writer herself.

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•

•

•

•

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•

jealousies that would lead to suspicions being realized. These are epic errores and romance aventures. Migrancy Movement from place to place with clear-cut objectives and goals in mind, as when different brothers disperse to various ports to establish trading centres, marry into local elite families, and raise new families educated in the skills and professions of the region. Middles Situations where individuals and families undertake temporary forays into other regions or classes of society for purposes of commerce, education, or adventure with the tacit understanding they will return home more or less regularly and exchange roles with other members of the family. Individuals may also spend various parts of their lives in different identities, changing alternately, sequentially, or even simultaneously through a variety of ruses, masks, and poetic tricks. All brothers or sisters may share the same Christian names in order to confuse informers and spies as they move about and return. Madness Real or feigned, the mental life of the New Christians always on the move, always suspected, and always insecure leads to states of anxiety that may manifest as quixotic idealism, arrogant buoyancy, desperate melancholy and other bizarre conditions. Monstrosity The freak of nature, the monstrous Jew disturbed, shocked and appalled the ruling elites wherever they travelled because of their unwillingness to accept any subjection of their freedom to worship God and live by the Law. Though willing to pay their taxes, obey the laws of social order and loyalty to the nation, they could not accept interference with their peculiar identity as a Chosen People. These political distinctions were mythologized into abhorrent, grotesque physical or biological traits. Syncretic Space Living among the nations, Jews nevertheless never gave up their longing to return to the Promised Land where they could re-establish their own nation according to the brít with God and thus dwell together under the same Law. They chose to think of themselves as only temporarily in Galut, dispersed and in exile, yet nevertheless sovereign to themselves. Therefore they were at once in the time and place of slavery to the Lands of Idolatry and always on the way home, transforming their reality into a time of hope and a place of expectation. Masquerade A peculiarly useful term because it encompasses both the sense of a carnival, festival and fiesta, thus a large body of people collecting together to indulge 180

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•

•

in antinomian and excessive behaviour, and the collective disguising of faces, bodies, genders, social status and even species. Significantly, too, the primary masquerade in Jewish tradition, the Feast of Purim, is also the Festival of Esther, the key biblical figure in Marrano and Crypto-Jewish experience: she is the hidden saviour, married to a non-Jewish king, who acts on behalf of the hidden God, who is never mentioned in the Megillah, the Book of Esther. The rabbis also say Purim is also hiding inside the Days of Atonement, yomim ha-kipPURIM. Simulation Paired with dissimulation, this term refers to a general phenomenon and practice in early Modern Europe among all nations and religions. Because of the religious wars that swept over the continent in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sometimes concluded by egregious pacts requiring peoples within a given political entity to adopt the religious persuasion of their ruler rather than the dictates of their conscience or the principles of their rational minds, large numbers of people — individuals, families, communities — were forced to pretend to be what they were not, to live on the outside in conformity with the dominant culture and on the inside in a close approximation to their desired way of feeling and their valuesystem. Secret meeting-houses, disguised clerics, and duplicitous and ambiguous performance of religious obligations marked the age, so that the case of Jews in all their fuzzy forms are part of this Baroque distortion of mental space. Mimicry Seemingly a sub-category of many of the concepts listed above, mimicry suggests two facets of the general phenomena not adduced in the discussions so far. On the one hand, there is the instinctive copying of persons, actions and values in the immediate vicinity, something like the character of Zelig in Woody Allen’s film of the same title: thus more than the chameleon’s blending into the background, there is here a near transformation or metamorphosis of personality, mentality and social identity. On the other hand, because mimicry elides easily with the behaviour of apes and monkeys, and hence with the comical antics of clowns and mimes, the concept here implies a critical attitude of mockery and satire. There is a danger here, as elsewhere, already suggested in the term “madness”, that the performers in this game will forget who they really are and begin to believe they have become what their disguise pretends they are.

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FAMILIARES, MALSINES AND POLILLIOS So little is the unforgettable opposed to forgetting that it may slip the mind of the one to whom it would most exemplarily apply . . . Amnesia . . . can guard the unforgettable; it may even be its safest refuge. — Daniel Heller-Roazen89 The residents of the Valley were not only proud of their ancestry, they were also religious, superstitious and rebellious. You can feel the pride, the religion and the superstitions in the stories and dichos (sayings) that were passed on to us by our elders such as la llorona (the crying woman), las Brujas (the witches) and los penitentes (a religious order restricted to the Catholic men). Their rebellious traits were well documented in several books that covered the first conflicts between the first settlers and the Indians and later on when the Hispanics and the Indians fought together against the Americans and Texans. — Ruben E. Archuleta90

After that somewhat whirlwind of impressionistic aperçus, it is time to turn back to a more formal history of Hispanic culture, traditions and madness. While there have been other inquisitions before and after the founding of the Santa Oficia in Iberia, some run by the Church and others by the state in collaboration with the papal government, the most notorious of them are the two in Spain and Portugal. They were focused on tracking down, arresting, and interrogating recently — and not so recently — converted Jews in order to purify their kingdoms and overseas territories in Europe and the New Worlds of the heretical practice of Judaizing. These were the “lobos y perros” (wolves and dogs) who endangered the society and the One True Faith.91 More than that, the Holy Offices of the Inquisition were established during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as state-run institutions in the Catholic Kingdoms Spain and Portugal92 and, on behalf of a new sense of purified 89

90

91 92

Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalia: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone Books, 2005) p. 230. The author is here explicating a concept from Walter Benjamin, especially from the German author’s discussion of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot in Gesammelte Schriften, eds., Herman Schweppenhauser and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972–91) vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 239–240. Ruben E. Archuleta, I Came from El Valle: From the Fields to the Chief ’s Office, ed. Terry Freeman (Pueblo, CO: Schuster’s Printing, 1999) p. 2. Ibañez, La Inquizición en Mexico, p. 114. Joseph Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition: A History, trans. Janet Lloyd (London: Profile Books, 2004; orig. French 2002).

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nationalism, sought to delve into the secrets of the individual mind and the unconsciousness of groups to which individuals belonged by intrinsic, “blood” origins. Inquisitors sought to produce evidence of these private secrets in a public “act of faith” or auto-da-fé. All aspects of the inquisitorial process were carried out in secret by means of intimidation, spies and other informers, and torture. Everyone involved in the process, victims and victimizers, was sworn to silence. Although almost all the individuals denounced to the Holy Office and arrested, imprisoned, and subject to its methods of interrogation, were either unaware of the crimes they were accused of or engaged in complex strategies of self-concealment, they were fully aware of the institution’s methods and powers.93 In my argument, I will concentrate on the primary targets in the opening years of the Holy Office both in Spain and Portugal and particularly in its operations in their New World colonies to eradicate all signs of the judaizing heresy. From time to time, however, I will refer to other inquisitions, especially in the Italian states, in order to provide a wider context in which to view the way both the persecutors and the persecuted behaved, spoke of themselves, and affected one another. Because of the Expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the forced mass conversion in Portugal in 1496, legally there were no longer any Jews on the Iberian Peninsula and eventually in the overseas territories (in parts of Italy, the Mediterranean islands, or North Africa) or colonies of the two Catholic monarchies. Though the Inquisition came to be more concerned with the Lutheran heresy, witchcraft and sexual deviancy, in the last two centuries of its operation, and always had a subordinate interest in seeking out and punishing clerical abuses and sexual improprieties and perversions, its main concern — one is tempted to say, both its founding and defining concern — was to destroy the residue of Jews and Judaism in Iberian culture. The inquisitors on the whole and at particular times displayed a passing interest in Moriscos or formerly Muslim New Christians. The formerly Sephardic New Christians who awaited arrest and who were taken into custody and subject to the bizarre methods of the peculiar institution nevertheless often had an acute awareness of what they were up against. If they were not quite what David Ramirez would like to believe, descendants and continuers of the Maccabees, who fought the occupying and desecrating forces of Hellenistic paganism in the Land of Israel, they were certainly rebellious — ornery, cantankerous, malcontents. Educated New Christian families and individuals shared information and as far as possible prepared in advance for the inevitable knock on the door — to engage with the officers of the Inquisition by playing off their own supposed ignorance of its procedures and that of the institution which sought to find a means of uncovering those truths 93

Henry Méchoulan, Les Juifs du silence au siècle d’or espagnol (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003).

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about its victims which they could only know by second-hand information and through inference from a long list of suspicious signs against which they measured the confessions taken from those victims. Through relatives, friends and sympathetic insiders working for the Holy Office at all levels from inquisitors or fiscals and priests or friars down to jailers and servants, New Christians could learn the formal and informal ways by which the Inquisition worked; there were also persons arrested and later released — whether as penitents (reconciliados) or as cases who were suspended for various reasons — who broke the code of silence explicitly or inadvertently. Historically, while there were probably more Crypto-Jews who practiced their ancestral faith in private and, perhaps in a quasi-open fashion in the century preceding the Expulsion, than has usually been allowed for; despite the return of many Sephardim who had fled to Portugal from Castille in 1492 at the time of the union of the two royal houses and kingdoms, Crypto-Jews and Marranos (we shall distinguish between the two shortly) were probably less numerous and influential than has sometimes been asserted in the romantic vision of these phenomena. Nevertheless, so far as the Holy Office in Spain and Portugal was concerned, judaizantes posed a major existential — social, spiritual, cosmic: who knows the bounds of such fantastic and psychotic thinking?94 — threat to Catholic hegemony and seemed to be a dangerous (infectious or contagious) hidden reality in everyday Iberian life for many centuries. In that sense, the Inquisition functioned as a quixotic institution, tilting at windmills and destroying the lives of thousands and thousands of real people on very spurious grounds. It was also the windmill itself, a contraption grinding out information and misinformation, powered by the voices of the agents of the Holy Office, the confessions and screams of its victims, all supposed to be kept secret, pulverized into silence. It created a highly contentious textual pseudoreality from what the inquisitors read in its own books of anti-Judaism, ranging from the New Testament through saints’ lives to rabidly psychotic tracts of its own devising or at least influence — and it attempted to impose on this verbal delusion (delírío) the cachet of state and religious authority.95 Secrecy permitted the lies of the Inquisition to function without proper supervision by any other crown, civil or ecclesiastical authorities, and the process of discovery — that is, the coercive powers of the Holy Office as a confessional agency to disclose 94

95

This, after all, is the perennial fear of anti-Semites of all stripes and persuasions, be they Inquisitors, pogramniks in Russia, anti-Zionist terrorists or whatever: that there is a world conspiracy, a mystical plot, a treacherous plan to take over all nations; and that all Jews never are what they seem, cannot be trusted, and by their very existence poison the wells of the universe. Marie Theresa Hernández, Delírío. The Buried History of Nuevo León: The Fantastic, the Demonic, and the Réel (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000).

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the judaizing heresy — proved to be a mythic event ritualized in the autos-dafé put on to justify and cover-up the grim realities of arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation, humiliation and torture. Yet in another sense, these rival concepts of secrecy and discovery were also dynamic systems of social-construction and personal-revelation in regard to remnants of the Sephardic communities in Spain and Portugal. The countercontraption of those who were trapped-together in the history of their own suffering Insofar as the themes, images, and activities of text and countertext depended on the Holy Office to continue — that is, the people caught up in two or more versions of truth jockeying for position or seeking balance in a bizarre juxtaposition: the versions of reality and delusion each seeing-andthinking machine manifested themselves in the witty concepts and metaphysical conceits of Baroque culture, a culture in which the fusion of incongruous, uncoordinated, and discontinuous modes of being could be celebrated as elaborate and ingenious conceits, grotesque collocations and emblems, or anamorphic plays (including stage plays, but also civil and ecclesiastical shows such as the auto-da-fe, and history itself) on perspective and paronomasia. In the artistic figure of anamorphosis, wherein scenes and bodies are elongated, distorted, and foreshortened, there developed an optic through which we can now attempt to discern the actual shape and content of what then constituted inquisitorial secrecy in the sense of profound shifts in mentality — changes often too subtle to register on the consciousness of the individuals and the groups involved in the process. In this way, other social and psychological tensions, which seemed utterly incompatible or unendurable, could play themselves out in secret — unconsciously, as they were articulated into one of numerous antitexts, the existence of which, when brought to conscious awareness, threatened the viability of the other as a legitimate, emotionally-satisfying matrix of identity. These anti-texts, I want to argue, were possible and endurable only because they were perceived in anamorphosis and thereby not read at all or misread as threatening counter-texts; so that each side in the game of inquisitor versus suspected heretic, on the one hand, recognized the historical substantiality of the other, though, on the other, denying theological validity, that is, ultimate reality, to its rival. In this last sense of mirror-distortions, two different — not always opposite and incompatible — pictures or narratives of self and society contend for position and are sometimes precariously juxtaposed. But the deformations and concealments may have also hidden those aspects of each text and institution or contraption which made them more than viable or unviable alternatives. This when simplistic antitheses break down and superficial notions of irony as sarcasm fall apart. The situation was far more subtle, nuanced in its balances or pseudo-balances, and complex, with often only minor distinctions or distortions pretending to be mirror-reflections of one another. 185

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These contraptions and their products and processes could also be text and anti-text, in the sense that those aspects of the manifest appearance of one and the other constitute only part of their full expression, a significant part or most of which could neither be seen by the other or fully realized by the self; but which, if allowed to move out of the shadows or the silence that masked them, their mutual fullness would cancel out or destroy at least one of the textualities altogether. At a more nuanced level, the images that seem to reflect back upon one another with hostility are actually very close in specific details or patterns of relationship: the small differences nevertheless are sufficient to cancel out the essential identity of each, leaving only a very thin shimmery or shadowy essence that can barely be discerned from either side of the lookingglass. Moreover, any crazy juxtaposition — for what is what these monstrous and irrational phenomena are — into a so-called metaphysical conceit or stretching out of shape into a virtually unrecognizable configuration always risked, at the moment when conscious or unconscious playfulness and witty conceptualizing ended, cracking apart or losing touch with the vital point of game-enhancement. These anti-texts did not only seek to occupy completely the space of consciousness and cultural plenitude of the other, but above all to eradicate any rivals. However, in the processes of this struggle, they also created the conditions in which their own self-professed identity was transformed into a condition of illogic and unacceptability. Hence the secrecy — the silence and invisibility — of the Inquisition in its dealings both with the heresies and perversions it sought to cleanse and exclude from Christian society was, on the one hand, a disguise, to itself as well as to society at large, of its antiChristian reality; and the other, it was a form of collective national madness that it shared with the rest of society insofar as Iberian society permitted the Holy Office to exist and helped it to function. Let us take an instance from literature, the perhaps most Marranesque of typical Spanish writings, Don Quixote. Thus Dominque Aubier wrote in Don Quichotte, prophète d’Israël in 1966: . . . if one accepts that Cervantes’ thought proceeds from a dynamic engagement with the concepts of the Zohar, themselves resulting from a dialectic dependence on Talmudic concepts, which in turn sprang from an active engagement with the text of Moses’s book, it is then on the totality of Hebrew thought — in all its uniqueness, its unity of spirit, its inner faithfulness to principles clarified by a slow and prodigious exegesis — that the attentive reader of Don Quixote must rely in order at last to be free to release Cervantes’ meaning from the profound signs in which it is encoded.96 96

Dominque Aubier, Don Quichotte, prophète d’Israël: essai (Paris R. Laffont, 1966) p. 283 cited in Michael McGaha, “Is There a Hidden Jewish Meaning in Don Quixote?” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 24:1 (2004) 177.

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As we have already started to argue, this kind of approach to an essentialist Judaism, even if triply layered through Tanakh, Gamara and Kabbalah, overlooks some of the essentials in Sephardic civilization, not least its history of dissension in the Maimonidean Controversies, its descent into disorder, collapse and dispersion with the persecutions and defections of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and its various kinds of reconstitution in the contexts of Oriental Jewry, European Reformation culture and politics, and Hispanic and Portuguese disguises and distortions.97 Nevertheless the collective enterprise created a powerful tool of defence and dissimulation, an intricate though creaking machinery that in some aspects is Crypto-Jewish, in some Marranesque, and in some bizarrely and questionably Christian. At the same time, when the Holy Office sought to expose by secret means the concealed Jewishness of the Judaizers it arrested, intimidated and tortured, the Inquisition in fact created new kinds of Jews where no conscious (practicing) Jews had existed before or could exist in the aftermath or wake of the Inquisition’s persecutions and threats of torture; and, when it belatedly recognized this secret or at least had some inkling of its presence, it could only attempt to destroy these judaizantes before they had a chance to express anything but the heretical “Dead Law of Moses” modelled on inquisitorial instruction. The physical, as well as spiritual annihilation of these grotesque and mad forms of Judaism seemed necessary by the zealots and fanatics to avoid recognizing how grotesque and insane the Inquisition itself was. However, simultaneously, the Judaizers who learned to be some form of CryptoJews — we call them Marranos in a strict sense98 — from the interrogations and instructions of the friars and other agents appointed by the Holy Office to force the accused to confess to their heresy and renounce it in favour of a penitential rebirth as Christians, made disturbingly evident — in a manner that had to remain secret to the outside world and to the inquisitors themselves — that their own religious tradition was informed by Jewish roots and concepts, however much distorted or denied. Should an accused judaizer be convinced by the inquisitors that he or she was a heretic and to seek through penitence reconciliation to the Church, that return to the one true faith involved a procedural acceptance, too, of the need 97

98

Hartman puts it aptly: “For Maimonides, intellectual love of God does not lead to a condition of mystic union in which man transcends awareness of his humanity. Yirah [fear of the Lord] implies that man is conscious of himself as a creature even during moments of intellectual communion . . . The awe and humility felt by the philosopher when he encounters God’s majesty results from reflection on God’s wisdom as manifest in nature” (Maimonides: Torah and the Philosophical Quest, p. 210). That is, to distinguish these people caught in an amorphous middle position between sincere Christians and secretly believing although not practicing Jews. They might also be called quasi-Jews or perhaps pseudo-Jews. I prefer the term Fuzzy Jews.

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to repress any public statement of having passed through this process. What happened in the secret processes and in the torture chambers of the Holy Office would always have to remain concealed, so that, in this distortion of Christian love and forgiveness, the Catholic faith was compromised, the Spanish or Portuguese identity deformed, and the individual’s sincerity of penitence made suspect again. It would have been unlikely anything other than fear of consequences of not reconciling oneself to the Church and therefore of being subject to the very processes denied — the threats and practice of torture — could have convinced individuals to seek penance: such a desire to be a reconciliado meant betrayal of one’s neighbours, friends, and family, of one’s faith in the mercy of the Christian God or the justice of the Jewish Law, and of oneself as a competent, rational and trustworthy person. Yet one may also think in terms of another inter-textual relationship played out in secrecy, and that is of text and non-text. When the accused Judaizer was asked to confess to his or her heretical beliefs and practices, not only in many instances must the Jewishness (rather than Judaism)99 postulated as there by the inquisitors be carefully taught and deliberately constructed, but what was created in apparent compliance with the pressures of the men who intimidated, threatened and tortured was a specific refraction of what they wish to find, not what is essentially Jewish by rabbinical law or age-old Sephardic traditions. Except perhaps in the very first generation of conversion, forced or sincere, the New Christian had been so alienated from talmudic law and Jewish custom that there was no clear memory of the prior identity and no means of verifying one’s self-concepts except in the documents and oral instruction supplied by the Holy Office itself. Yet for those Judaizers who came to assert their Jewishness in defiance of the Inquisition and were exposed as heretics in the auto-da-fé, although the identity they came to see in themselves and sought to display to the public when relaxed to secular society for the spectacle of this act of faith, does not fit with halachah (law) or recognized minhagim (custom). Nevertheless such a pseudo- or quasi-Judaism was filled with a sincere intensity of belief that was denied by the false construction of the inquisitors’ own sense of what constituted judaizing. The professing pseudoor quasi-Jew100 at the stake proclaimed in public a Jewishness created by and infused with Christian misperceptions and yet it was a heretical faith — a fuzzy Judaism — that defied inquisitorial control; and which could threaten the mythical faith of the inquisitors, their self-delusions as to who and what they 99

100

For much as the Inquisitors thought they understood Judaism, they were always wrong and were pursuing the phantom of their own devising, and at best glimpsed a distorted version of the Jewishness Marranos had absorbed, redesigned, and played out in games of distortion for them. See our discussion of “Fuzzy Jews” in Troubled Souls, eds. Norman Simms and Charles Meyers (Hamilton, NZ: Outrigger Publishers, 2001) “Introduction”.

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were and who they were pursuing. There are instances, in fact, of judaizantes turning the tables on the friars sent to instruct them in the One True Faith and of spies (familiares) sent to provoke incriminating statements in the dungeons where arrested victims were kept; the Jewish argument would prevail, and these familiars of the Holy Office would seek conversion to Judaism, including often circumcision of a very crude sort.101 For the Holy Office, annihilation of the judaizer and his or her heresy was consequently imperative because, by their own intrinsic logic, it threatened to take the place of Christianity as a faith with such absolute conviction that it can never be gainsaid by reason — by a textual argument or narrative. Meanwhile, by absorbing into itself the Church’s misreadings of Judaism, the New Jew, as it were, went to the stake as though he or she were a true and traditional believer, but, once the secret is exposed, with a faith shaped by Christian notions of faith and salvation — by an act that could not be sustained either by a legitimizing Catholic or Jewish text. Returning now to the methods by which the Inquisition hoped to expose the secret judaizing of the persons it surrounded with the secrecy of its institutional operations, putting aside for the moment the extraneous motives of veniality, corruption and incompetence, we find that those creaking old machines were cogent and rational on their own terms. That is, the inquisitors investigated the accused Judaizers through careful, calculated techniques of analyzing character, actions, and documents, employing a variety of agents — the hired familiars and the voluntary informers or malsines — to collect and record information, as well as subjecting the accused to interrogations, instructions, and tortures. Because the officers and familiars of the Holy Office were usually psychologically dissociated from the pains and humiliations they inflicted on their victims, they could approach their task methodically and work in an almost modern scientific (objective) way.102 Like a psychoanalyst or social scientist today, the inquisitor sought to discover in the unintended, seemingly trivial or cumulative collection of information patterns of meaning, clues to concealed beliefs and 101

102

It would be hard to know whether this friar or that priest, who was overwhelmed by the convincing argument of the New Christian judaizer that the dead Law of Moses was not dead at all, were not himself a converso or child or grandchild of one. Within a century of the great mass conversions the religious, military and other associations in Iberia were infiltrated by the converts and their progeny, sometimes placed there to get them out of harm’s way because of their unstable or treacherous natures, sometimes to provide leverage and influence for the family expecting to be denounced at any times, sometimes as “moles” to wait for the correct moment to emerge when the Messianic Day was announced. Consider here too what Hannah Arendt had to say about Adolf Eichmann and other bureaucrats of the Final Solution, that they manifest not so much rabid hatred or profound bigotry, but the banality of evil; they were just doing their job and took pleasure in keeping an efficient machine (contraption) going.

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evidence of premeditated schemes of deception. The inquisitors did not, of course, think in twentieth-century psychoanalytic terms of the unconscious and its processes of repression and censorship. Instead, they searched for deliberately hidden truths about the accused’s inner beliefs and those culturally or biologically induced qualities that remained as a residue of prior Jewishness in the blood of the judaizer or which were created by circumstances of their upbringing and condition of existence within supposedly organized cabals of Crypto-Jews. The inquisitors slowly, over months and years, decades and sometimes whole lifetimes, patiently and carefully collected, collated, cross-referenced and analyzed the data they accumulated from denunciations, interrogations, spies in the dungeons, notations of torture, and other sources, such as intercepted letters passed between prisoners.103 They kept detailed files of their own interrogations, along with denunciations and other documents collected on the background of persons they were interested in. They also requested archival searches in other offices of the Inquisition both in Europe and in the New World colonies in order to discover the personal, family and professional history of the accused. As the formal process of investigation could cover many years, with the arrested persons either kept in custody for long periods or allowed back into the community for shorter or longer periods, sometimes as a penitent (reconciliado) and sometimes not, the inquisitors were able to track out over extended periods of time the shifting statements made by individuals and groups of related persons or by priests, civic officials, or neighbours. By the regulation of secrecy, the accused was never presented with the specifics of the crimes they were assumed to be guilty of nor told the names of their accusers. The individuals therefore attempted by various means to tell the Holy Office in Spain and Portugal what it is they wished to hear without exposing themselves to serious consequences, to run through possible denouncers and to explain away causes for envy or misunderstanding, without endangering relatives, friends or neighbours to arrest themselves, and to create 103

These several paragraphs are a synthesis of many books and articles, only some of which can be named here: José Torobido Medina, Historia del Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima (1569–1820) Vol. 1 (1888) online at http://www21.brinkster.com/fito81/mediinqui (Seen 16/11/2003). Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, 4 vols. (New York: MacMillan, 1906–1907). Alejandro Sanchez-Marti, “Autos inquisitioriales en el Peru de lost primeros Austrias (1575–1625) Antropologica, Congreso Virtual 2000 online at http:// www. naya.org.ar/congreso2000/ponencias/Alejandro_Sanchez (Seen 17/01/2004). Guillermo Hierrezuelo Conde, Review of Rodriguez Besné, José Ramón, El Consejo de la Suprema Inquisición. Perfil jurídico de una Institución. (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2000) in Rev.estud. hist-jurid. N. 22 (Valparaiso 2000) online at http://wee.scielo.cl/scielo. php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0716-54552000002200067&. Yacov DaCosta, “Visitações do Santo Oficio” Memorial Brasil Safarad at http://www.geocities.com/brasilsefarad/ visitacaos (Seen 21/01/2004).

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an alternative explanations (counter-texts) for supposed acts or statements that might have been denounced. Insofar as possible, family members, business associates, and friends attempted to communicate before, during, and after interviews with the inquisitors in order to coordinate stories and to seek out hints as to what the process seems to be about. When possible, familiars of the Inquisition, as well as servants in the prisons and administrative visitors were bribed to carry messages or to lobby on the accused’s behalf.104 Suspected Judaizers, during their lengthy processes, eventually shifted their original stories and explanations to meet with what they assumed were the specific interests of their interrogators, and then the inquisitors, at the same time, examined these variations and new versions both for discrepancies and clues as to concealed or to forgotten incriminating events and oblique expressions of heresy. It was a kind of game-strategy, requiring subtle negotiating skills and near infinite patience. Each side in the game tested and probed, re-ordered its strategies, and patiently waited for the other to show signs that could be interpreted in such a way as to clinch their case. For the most part, both the inquisitors and the accused Judaizers shared Spanish and Portuguese culture and advanced training and education. Each side worked essentially within the same discourses and with the same discursive skills to understand the secret motives of the other. A very high proportion of men brought before the Holy Office were literate and educated professionals, university-trained and experienced in public life in commerce, law, medicine and even theology. The women, too, were often literate and educated beyond the norms of ordinary Spanish or Portuguese culture at the same time; and where they were indeed products of generations of Marrano experience, these women also demonstrated a fair degree of knowledge of non-institutionalized Jewish customs and traditions. Since these Judaizers, male and female, would have been brought up to be wary of self-exposure or incriminating the family in public, they had already developed sensitivity to the kind of intimidation used by the Inquisition. But this contest of wills was mostly a game of cat and mouse, with the Judaizers always at a disadvantage because of the powers at the disposal of the Holy Office to arrest, confiscate, and torture its victims. At certain times, the accused were able to manipulate the veniality and corruption of the inquisitorial system, but this was relatively rare and not something to be depended on. Unless they chose to assert their Jewish identity, the New Christians tended to seek a means of diminishing their guilt and accommodating to the wishes of the 104

Denise Helena Monteiro de Barros Carollo, “Family Dramas, Prison Dramas: Correspondence between Portuguese Businessmen in the Seventeenth Century” in Charles Meyers and Norman Simms, eds., Troubled Souls: Conversos, Crypto-Jews, and other Confused Jewish Intellectuals from the Fourteenth through the Eighteenth Century (Hamilton, NZ: Outrigger Publishers, 2001) pp. 76–110.

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Inquisition and thus avoiding the severest punishments, such as confiscation of all their wealth, slavery on the galleys, exile to remote colonies, and burning at the stake; or at least to prevent themselves from incriminating spouses, children, other relatives, friends, and business associates. But often enough, the inquisitors were sufficiently clever to force the accused eventually to recall, admit, and beg pardon for crimes that were discovered only after many years of analysis, although assumed to be there from almost the beginning of the process. By its own lights, the Holy Office worked to rational and methodical principles and degrees of proof. Another perspective, however, is required: that of the Jews and their Jewish mentality. In addition to the story of how the Sephardim in Spain and Portugal were able to learn about the Inquisition and its modus operandi and then later, when under arrest, were able to communicate with fellow prisoner and colleagues outside, there is the history of how rabbinical law treated issues such as apostasy and incrimination of one’s friends, relatives and neighbours under torture or the threat of physical violence. There is a long tradition too of what Jewish communities did and thought about the hostile world they were passing through during the Galut or Exile and what strategies, mechanisms and rationalizations were developed to cope with explicit hostility and coercive seduction. At the highest intellectual levels, new myths and theological schemes were worked out to integrate the crises of Iberian intolerance into the mentality of the Jewish people. Moreover, since at least the pogroms of 1390, when large numbers of Sephardim became New Christians and participated in — at all levels of society, as well as in leadership positions — Catholic civilization, there would emerge an additional dimension to those drawing on ancient Hebraic roots and honed in centuries of European persecution: that is, the additional dimension of the Crypto-Jews and Marranos, individuals and families who were intimately aware of and often professionally-trained in the subtleties of Catholic affective worship and intellectual theology.

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THE ALTERNATIVE COUNTER-CONTRAPTIONS OF THE RAMBAN, A NEW KABBALAH AND THE SO-CALLED GRANDEES OF FRENCH JEWRY My intention is neither to denounce nor debate you [Rabbi Judah al-Fakhkhar], but to let you know about the person whom you have chosen and declared to be righteous, wise, and unblemished. Whereas in fact he [Rabbi Jonah] is wicked and unlearned, given that he had passed to the side of evil [gone over to the Church for assistance]. Perverted his ways, and become an informer and an enemy collaborator. His subsequent actions revealed the motives of earlier actions. — David Qamhi105

Having said all this concerning the Inquisitions in Iberia and the New World, with all the consequences of a state of fear, intimidation and anxiety, it behooves us to recall — or for those who cannot recall because of the structural amnesia of the scholarly world inside and outside of Judaism, to point out — that persecutory factors were at work within Iberian Jewry centuries before the establishment of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. Unless we grasp this momentous and tragic turn of events in Sephardic history, we cannot understand the mass conversions, the failed attempts to continue a secret Judaism, and the descent into further antinomian and bizarre beliefs and practices. There are several reasons to explain this tragic event: (a) Madness: everyone or nearly everyone in Jewish Spain suddenly went crazy together and followed lead of Ashkenazi rabbis who had arrived, traumatized after the massacres and self-sacrifices of the first two crusades;’ (b) Ignorance: the defection of several key rabbinical figures to the side of the anti-Maimonideans, kabbalists and ignoramuses who followed a mythical configuration, “the Grandees of France”, caused a radical and rapid break in the education level of most ordinary Sephardim, making them susceptible to conversionist pressures from the Christian side; (c) Naiveté: a weak-willed public, lulled into false security by the apparent tolerance of the Church and the inefficiency of the state or at least the seeming deflection of attention by states and cities engaged in civil wars; either caught off-guard by the outbreak of anti-Jewish rioting and so panicked into hasty conversions, with the hope of a quick return to normality once the crisis had passed, or sincerely trusting in the promises of the kings and bishops who reassured the Jewish community that they had their best interests at heart and that acceptance of Christianity would 105

Cited by Faur, The Horizontal Society, Chapter 5, Section 56.

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involve no major changes in their social lives, moral beliefs, and personal status, except for the better (d) Cynicism: the success of many Jewish merchants, civil servants and diplomats in the service of the court pulled along with them the financial flourishing of sufficient numbers of the Juderias to create a generation of selfish, materialistic young people, hedonistic and prey to Averrroist ideas, so that baptism appeared an easy step in the pursuit of personal advancement and pleasures; (e) Despair: after more than a century of squabbling and rancorous argumentation, with many great rabbinical leaders accepting baptism and emerging as powerful ecclesiasts and Christian mystics, the pogroms in 1390 were the last straw: God truly seemed to have abandoned the Jews, the Law to have failed, and the community to have collapsed. There was no use in resisting. (f) Apocalyptic Fanaticism: the wish to believe that all the suffering and humiliations were the birth pangs of the messianic age, and that the terrors would come to an end sooner if that process were speeded through abandonment of the failed way of life and descent into the darkness of outright sinfulness. Both the cause and the consequence of the Maimonidean Controversies wobbled on the fulcrum of the difference between Rambam’s rationalism and Ramban’s irrationalism, while the whole community, as it were, spun out of control because neither rabbi was as extreme as his followers claimed and each one’s works were used to justify unjustifiable positions.106 The Iberian world of the Sephardim became untenable because the causes of the fissuring moved up the alphabetical points set out just now.

106

David Bassous, “Superstition and Magic” online at http:/home.earrth.net/~etzhaim/ halakhah/Superstition (Seen 16/01/2007). “While Rambam superimposed his view of Divine Providence upon a naturalistic order that excluded any possibility of astrological influences, Ramban’s view on astrology and black magic is that part of G-d’s plan was that higher celestial objects do have some control over human affairs. Ramban built his doctrine of ‘hidden miracles’ upon an infrastructure of a world governed by the stars.”

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UNA FIESTA DE SANGRE Confieso que por ser inobedientes Fuimos de nuestra patria deshechados Vibimos entre incircunçissas gentes Con hombres y con guerras afrentados Todos con crueldades diferentes Fuimos de nuestra patria desechados volvamos al Señor que él es piadosso que él hará nuestro spiritu gozosso. I confess that because we were disobedient we were thrown out of our country. We live among uncircumcised people, hungry and facing war. We are all thrown out of our country by different means. Let us return to the Lord, for He is generous and will please our spirit.107

We have shown to a certain degree already that the Inquisition is much more than an instrument of Church-State oppression and persecution used to control the middle classes and particularly those parts of the rising entrepreneurial society who could be attacked precisely through their ancestral links to Judaism by means of impure blood, a psycho-social stain that continued for generations after the initial conversions. It was, as we suggested, also very much an instrument that in collecting information for processing in its own bureaucratic apparatus also tended to produce new kinds of facts, such as judaizing by those who previously did not know what they were doing or the significance of their behaviour or beliefs prior to interrogations and instructions by the agents of the Holy Office. And this new kind of data influenced the workings of the interlocking apparatus of the state, church and other organs of society which supported it — so that all of them came to depend on the contraption’s abilities to generate funds, provide jobs, and organize social relationships. At this point we wish to show that there was another large contraption set up in Iberian lands and the territorial expansions outside its own peninsular domains, including large parts of the circum-Mediterranean region, portions of western Europe, some Catholic and some Protestant, and lands in the new worlds of America, Asia, Africa and the Pacific. The term that seems appropriate in Spanish is un armatoste which comes with the sense of a an overly-elabourate and heavy piece of machinery, unwieldy and perhaps ultimately useless for the 107

“Cantico” of the Carvajals recorded in the Inquisition records of Mexico, cited and translated by Michelle M. Hamilton, “’No ha de ser vano’: Form and Meaning in the Sephardic Poetry of New Spain” Halapid 14:1 (Winter 2007) 6.

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purposes supposedly designed for; while in French, un truc has a more diverse signification, referring to ruses, stratagems, magicians tricks, traps, and such figments of the imagination as a truc d’oeil, an optical illusion. Portuguese allows either geringonςa, with a sense of the somewhat comical appearance of a ramshackle and gimcrack apparatus implied by the English term, or engenho, with a wider range from the practice of engineering or commerce, thus primarily a device to draw water out of a well or to crush sugar cane for processing and hence to the whole manufacture, shipment and distribution of the final product; and, then, on figuratively in the fields of aesthetics and psychology, as the wit of metaphysical poetry and other Baroque music, painting or architecture, and the capacity and operation of the ingenious mind for complex, clever and surprising inventiveness. This other contraption we shall call, for want of a better word at this time, a ludibrium, and we will see that to a certain extent it is co-extensive with what came to be known from the inside as the Nation, that is, the Nation of Spanish and Portuguese Jews, or quite simply as el naçio. This machine too was a means of collecting, organizing, and producing knowledge, as well as of seeing, evaluating, and applying such new knowledge, partly in order to counteract the hostile attempts of the Holy Office to destroy it, partly to neutralize the effects of the Inquisition as a means of forming an ecclesiastical polity inimical to both the kinds of Judaism and the kinds of Christianity which had allowed the strategic alliance of Iberian Jewish and Christian families in the first place, and to seek wherever possible to provide the safety, security and spiritual well-being of its members under increasingly impossible conditions. In the long run, the experimental108 machinery failed. It miscalculated its own capacity to be sustained once the breakdown of a Jewish-Christian synthesis had succumbed to external pressures and internal weaknesses, distance, isolation and despondency — even madness — being some of the more obvious factors. Nevertheless, in a few remote regions of the world, a few small communities have managed to survive, and today, as we have attempted to show, the individuals and families have begun to awaken from a long sleep-like trance to claim their identity based on the original compact or on the prior condition of being anousim, forced Jewish converts to an alien Catholic religion. All of this emerges only if we look at the historical phenomena involved as a narrative process known as midrashing.

108

We are using the term “experimental” in the same way as Cervantes did in his Experimental Novels, referring to real life experiences, exemplary test cases, and fictional versions of relatively unstructured narratives.

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CONFUSION AND DISCOMBOBULATION All these have befallen us, yet we have not forgotten Thee; neither have we faltered Thy covenant. Our heart has not coiled back, neither have our steps departed from Thy path. Though Thou hast crushed us in a place of jackals, and covered us with the shadow of death. Have we forgotten the name of our God? Have we stretched our hands to an alien god? O God! Would Thou not search this out? For He knows the secrets of the heart. Psalm 44 18–22

The use of the term contraption arises partly as a metaphor, rather than apparatus or instrument, to cover an elaborate, perhaps unwieldy and awkwardly-constructed paradigm that includes institutions, technological protocols, intellectual models, and social relationships. In the same period of history in western Europe, there were similar inventions being produced, circulated either as physical objects, descriptive or narrative models, or implicit family, clan or guild (brotherhood, sodality, corporate legal) bodies. On the one hand, then, one may speak of telescopes and microscopes, clocks and compasses, as well as other “machines” that were the cause, result, and record of scientific discovery; on the other, one may speak of commercial, financial and bureaucratic organizations that draw people into a large-scale, complex working group, collect data, trade-secrets, influence and money, create records and techniques of information retrieval, models for cross-referencing, and patterns of long-term observation and interrogation. These constitute the “intelligence” that is as much constructed as gathered. Though there is much scientific invention and discovery in the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, the role of Jews has not always been noted, or at least properly appreciated. This kind of Incidentalism, as we have termed it, arises from a structural or willful blindness of most scholarship. But Jews were able to exploit the new openings that appeared as the medieval Latin-Christian synthesis began to crack apart, not because of any racial peculiarity, such as genes for intelligence, but because Jews were, by and large, disassociated from the constraints within Christendom, such as a dogmatic approach to Scholasticism, a deep implication in the regulations and social network of feudalism and the guild system, and an inertia fixed into the culture by long-standing preconceptions and prejudices. Jews thus often could take risks — or were forced to by circumstances — and sought out opportunities amenable to their status within aristocratic and ecclesiastical states, not least of which was their ability to move relatively quickly from place to place, from culture to culture, and from one epistemological and ideological 197

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paradigm to another baroque and broken paradigm. It is easy, in a sense, to see Jews coming to dominate new industries, such as silk-making, refined glass manufacturing for scientific and aesthetic purposes, and canon-casting, as well as printing and distributing books; but perhaps less so in regard to tax farming, map-making, and other intellectual enterprises.

PASSION’S LUDIBRIUM MIDRASHED The Mishna is the apparatus designed to preserve Israel’s memory, to ward off imperialistic powers, and to unmask spurious Verus Israel. — José Faur109 Specifically, the midrash must shock us out of our predisposition to ignore breaks in normal affairs that are the gateway to perceiving the hidden hand of hashgacha. — Pinchas Rosenthal110

A midrashic perspective of the Passion as ludibrium will do more than give a rhetorical cum ludic or carnival version of what happens when one-time Jewish families enter into the order of the Penitentes and participate fully and fervently in their highly Catholic — many would say excessively and even grotesquely distorted Catholic rites — and these scoffers, mockers and sensationalists may not be all wrong. It will also permit us to leap across the abyss of supposed incompatibility and the clash of cultures, to see a continuation of historical compromises and religious accommodations that, while unacceptable to the pious and the orthodox in both Jewish and Christian camps, nevertheless did happen, and did and still does explain the crazy things done above and underground. For just as we have already pulled apart the supposed opposition between Christian and Jew, between New Christian and Old Christian, between Crypto-Jew and renegade, assimilating, practicing Jewish converso, showing these dichotomies to be inadequate to much more fuzzy sets of people — individuals and families, as much in single life times as across many generations — so, too we need to look at how Judaism and 109 110

Faur, The Horizontal Society, Chapter IV, Section 42. Pinchas Rosenthal, “Megillas Esther and Hashgacha” Jewish Times 5:21 (17 March 2006) online at www.mesora.org/JewishTimes. A hashgacha is a divine sign of favour or a rabbinical seal of approval. See Rabbi Yosef Gavriel Bechhofer, “Summary of HaMaspik L’ovdei Hashem of R. Avraham ben HaRambam — Bitachon, by Erich Kauffman, with his Notes” (November 20, 2007)online at http://rygb.blogspot.com/2007/11/summary-ofhamaspik-lovdei-hashem-of-r. (Seen 25 May 2008)

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Catholicism fissure into more subtle categories, with new lines of tension emerging between the fragmented sparks scattered about through Iberian history and across the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, not least in that wee corner of the world where the Penitentes continue to exist.

MACHINES, APPARATUS AND CONTRAPTIONS: INSTRUCTION, CONSTRUCTION AND DESTRUCTION Erroneously, some, particularly among “the best and the wisest” who could not accept incoherent blathering as a substitute for “Tora,” chose to defect and decided to escape the madness reigning in the Juderias . . . — José Faur111

So far we have argued that there were several kinds of machinery grinding away at the stability of religious tolerance and social harmony in Spanishspeaking lands from the Middle Ages to the early Modern Period, and these contraptions broke apart protocols of rational inquiry, judicial discussion, legislative debate, and other modes of discourse that traditionally followed the rules of rhetoric and dialectic. To a certain degree, as both Catholicism and Judaism in this part of the world transformed themselves into persecutory apparatuses, they also meshed into one another, the cogs of the Inquisition and that of the kabbalistic rabbinate, just as they drove the engine of the countercontraptions that attempted to maintain in secret and in exile the old ideals of conviviencia and tolerance. In this regard, our argument about the Penitentes as a very minor overseas remnant of this joint effort at repair and survival, rests on the new definitions we have given to terms and concepts that have hitherto forced scholars to overlook these small engines and small groups of people who generally do not register in statistical surveys. The process by which the refugees to the New World, to New Spain and then north to New Leon and further into the unknown, trackless wastelands beyond sought to perform the impossible, to not merely survive against all the odds, but to protect and gain strength from their secret identities, is by midrashing their own history. By turning midrash from a noun to a verb we emphasize its dynamic quality to shock, shatter and recreate the world and the world of the text. We have found that in Spain itself in the century before the Expulsion of 1492 there were many places where powerful and rich Jewish families entered into alliances with noble and important Christian clans, the reasons on one side, among the Jews to disperse members for safety in perilous times in various sections of 111

Faur, Horizontal Society, Chapter V, Section 66

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Catholic society — military, aristocratic, religious, intellectual and commercial; and among Christians to ally with and partake of international commercial networks and to draw on scientific, technical and philosophical expertise. These alliances, however, did more than protect, enrich and educate the families involved, but also, very importantly, created new fusions of knowledge and practical experience. By understanding the consequences in terms of midrashing technology, that is, by going beyond the economic and political implications, we see that three key factors were affected and changed: • Fusion of Christian and Jewish points of view about religious knowledge and ethics broke previous monopolies, each of which had been growing moribund and corrupt in the final phases of the Middle Ages, as indicated by the Maimonidean Controversies and the Reform/Counter-Reform Debates prior to the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition and the Council of Trent. • Techniques of mutual aid based on family ties that cut across religious boundaries — Christian and Jewish, to be sure, but also Catholic and Protestant, Crypto-Jewish and Jewish, and other more subtle distinctions, as well — created traditions of resistance to persecutory agencies, bigoted attitudes, and tendencies towards hedonism, agnosticism, cynicism, and atheism. • A sense of family loyalty and identity based on matters of secrecy, disguise, and cunning led to the development of coded languages, behaviours and aesthetic performances. For as the members of these allied families dispersed around the world, taking on diverse public roles to take advantage and exploit the many nations, religions and cultures in which they established outposts, they came to share a new kind of historical memory based on shared persecution, hopes, ideals and values.

LUDIBRIUM: A MACHINE TO SEE AND FEEL INSULTS Nunc autem derident me iuniores tempore quorum non dignabar patres ponere cum canibus gregis mei. But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock. Job 3:1

Though originally used as a term of opprobrium to describe the Crucifixion in the Vulgate translation of the New Testament, this very word ludibrium is to defuse the opprobrium attached to the scandal of Christ’s suffering and death. 200

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It is also the metaphoric extension of this term from Roman street theatre and circus entertainment that allows a new way to view the actions of the brothers of the Penitentes in their secret binding acts of discipline. The normal range of the word ludibrium in Spanish indicates its polysemia in classical rhetoric: zombaria, mockery and ridicule; escarnio, derision; joguete, plaything or toy, desonra, dishonour and disgrace. What is insulted, therefore, not only shocks and undermines the unquestioning acceptance of words, acts and significance, but recreates the basis of social bonding, psychological defensiveness, and spiritual union. This contraption to see with is no simple lens or mirror: it distorts, refracts, and transforms. The context [Pedro López de] Ayala presents is one of deudo — the bond of family, friendship, and vassalage that binds men together and obligates them to one another. For Ayala, deudo was the cement that bound society into a cohesive and peaceful state. Without it, there would be a state of predatory violence, and each man would be left to fend for himself. Although deudo within a nuclear family was legally imposed, the deudo that bound friend to friend and king to vassal has to be initiated by the persons involved and required persistent mending of relationship. Deudo was built upon love, loyalty, and gratitude — fragile motives easily destroyed by a single act of cruelty, insult, or aggression. Without the assistance of deudo, a man would feel isolated, vulnerable, alone in the world.112

One thinks of the Anglo-French feudal term fealty here, but Nader shows that much more is meant, and that more can be extended out beyond the technical parameters of the feudal system. When things go wrong at home or in a family or a community, there is the need for a fixer, someone who can mend and put things back together. Yet this tinker or fixer, as we shall soon see, and as Bernard Malamud has developed into the fictional world of his novel The Fixer, is at once the universal mender of the world, tikkun ha’olam, and the suffering Jew, unjustly accused of ritual murder (an imitation of deicide), abuse of the Host (a parody of the Eucharist and its sacramental Real Presence), and a foolish conspirator seeking to take over the world (a grotesque distortion of messianic aspirations). In Malamud’s Jewish-American novel, a recreation of the Mendel Beylis case in Czarist Russia, the hero Yacob Bok is accused of killing a young boy as part of a Jewish plot to make matzoh for Passover. He is a handyman, a fixer, but also a handy scapegoat for the Black Hundreds, a notorious antiSemitic organization.

112

Nader, The Mendoza Family p. 70. Ayala was one of the leading historians in the caballero school, trained in Avignon and attempting to cast Iberian civilization into the model of Renaissance ideals.

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BRICOLAGE, JONGLERIE AND OTHER GADGETS The bricoleur unconsciously uses what is available in both the natural and the contextual environment to build elements that fit into his own cultural pattern or structure . . . The concept of jonglerie, or identity juggling, refines bricolage and underlying structure. — S.D. Kunin113

The bricoleur, like the itinerant peddler, tinker, or shoemaker, goes around from house to house, farm to farm, village to village, and, with a bit of this and a bit of that, he puts everything to rights again, more or less. In moral life, however, historical continuity, social harmony and psychological equilibrium cannot be mended so easily. The all-purpose concept of deuda that keeps the world from falling into that state of Hobbesian anarchy and chaos comes close to the deuda, the moral and spiritual debt to the ancestors and the family dependent upon them. The term also approaches the Hebrew concept of zekhut, meaning accumulated, inherited or undeserved merit or grace. Such a concept also involves the guilt — and no less real, the hope — that beset those who set themselves adrift in the sea of religious controversy, political innovations, and social disruption; and anticipation of a divine wind (ruach) will direct them to a safe haven somewhere far away, a land of peace and quiet. How bad can things get? Just read these few lines from Psalm 44: 10. Even if you have forsaken us and put us to shame, and You do not go out in our hosts; You make us retreat from our adversary, and our enemies plunder for themselves; You deliver us as sheep to be eaten, and You scatter us among the nations. You sell Your people without gain, and You did not increase their price; You make us a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and a derision to those around us; 15. You make us a byword among the nations, a [cause for] shaking the head among the kingdoms.

This is surely what Yosef Kaplan means, when speaking of Portuguese Jews forced to convert and whose children and grandchildren never really could put back together the feeling of order and harmony into their lives. Even if they escaped to a city like Amsterdam, where they were tolerated, “they too shared the general feeling of instability and change affecting every area of 113

Seth D. Kunin, “Juggling Identities among the Crypto-Jews of the American Southwest” Religion 31 (2000) 51 and 42available online at doi:10.1006/reli.2000.0313 at http://www. idealibrary.com on Ideal.

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life, a feeling which was exacerbated in their case by the tendency towards disintegration within their congregation and the entire nação.”114 One way of feeling better in the midst of all this confusion was to make up a myth, as, for instance, Isaac Cardoso did in 1679, when he wrote in Las Excelencias de los Hebreos, that “The Hebrews are of the most noble blood, and their family tree is extremely ancient . . . Because of their antiquity, their election, their purity, and their isolation, the Jews are the most noble nation on the face of the earth.”115 Another way was to stress the continuing guidance and protection of the Law and the covenant between the Jews and their God. Another way was to pretend that Christianity is really Judaism and Christians are Jews and the Jewish way of thinking and envisioning the material and the spiritual worlds is perfected in Christian mystical visions. Another way was to return to Judaism, study the Law, and then sneak back into the Lands of Idolatry to try to persuade the waverers and the doubters to return to Judaism, too, even if at the cost of their and one’s own life. Another way is to laugh and treat the whole crazy world as one big Jewish joke. Another way is to try to forget, to hide the past from oneself and one’s children, to run off to foreign lands and re-invent oneself as normal and sane. Thus we discover, as Ric Oliviera reports, “[o]n São Miguel, a Jewish synagogue, hidden inside a Moorish-style building . . . ” and also on this island of the Azores a Jewish cemetery with crosses above the graves.116 The list of ad hoc attempts at tikkun can go on forever. The usual designation for the way in which folk cultures and tribal societies supposedly keep repeating their own essential elements within an unchanging concept of time and reality is through what Levi-Strauss called bricolage. The bricoleur is thus not just the travelling peddlar or craftsman who goes from place to place repairing and adjusting things for people who have no local shops to buy from and few or no replacements of their own or specialized instruments to use to patch things up, but the cultural creator who develops all the possible uses of the available resources.117 The tinker carries one or two tools and a few all-purpose pieces of wood or metal to supplement ordinary stuff found in each householder’s yard or farmer’s barn. By extension into anthropological metaphor, bricolage becomes the limited mental 114

115 116

117

Yosef Kaplan, “Political Concepts in the World of the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam during the Seventeenth Century: The Problem of Exclusion and the Boundaries of SelfIdentity” in Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan and Richard H/Popkin, eds., Menasseh ben Israel and his World (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989) p. 49. Cited in Kaplan, “Political Concepts,” p. 53. Ric Oliveira, “Portuguese/Jewish Link Ill-Defined” The Standard Times (11 April 1996) http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/daily/04-96/04-15-96/9porjew The term would also fit the “naive” santos-makers of the American southwest who carved or painted the holy objects for the Penitentes out of old crates, spare bits of cloth, and housepaint.

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equipment of myth, folktale and proverbial lore that is worked up again and again, so long as the community can be held together under the illusion of a seamless continuation of its own beliefs and practices. All too often, we are told by students of the Penitentes, that their rituals, songs and faith are merely the rejigged residue of high culture, whether remembered from the time when Franciscans dispensed occasional pastoral care or purveyed by itinerant santos makers trained in Old Mexico or peddlers supplied with commercial wares sent from the American east coast. A variation has been suggested recently to import a bit more creativity and dynamic inner direction to the culture of the Hermandad, the concept of jonglerie. Though we should be cautious from the very use of a medieval term that has negative connotations of trickery and shoddiness, in the sense that jongleurs were wandering entertainers who performed in court, town and hamlet, and their tricks included acrobatic turns, juggling and musical performances of a second-rate or at least second-hand type, there is an additional sense of the jongleur as an artist with a degree of spontaneity and jazz-like improvisation that when transferred as metaphor to the culture of the Penitentes grants some independence of thinking to the brotherhood. Nevertheless, even with this enhancement of significance, the term still is inadequate to the phenomena we actually witness in disciplinary performative rituals.

TIKKUN HA-OLAM, HA-NEFESH, HA-GOOF, HA-SHEM I want them to feel the cold shadow of the Inquisition falling over their lives. — Richard Zimler118 Rav Aba bar Zevda said: A Jew who sins remains a Jew. — Babylonian Talmud, Masechet Sanhedrin 44a

The idea of tikkun engages with notions of repair, corrections, realignment, completeness, and justifying of irregularities and mismatches, and thus a manipulation of particles of energy broken apart in an initial “big bang” of creativity. In the particular and peculiar history of the Crypto-Jews and 118

“Goa Inquisition Was Most Merciless and Cruel”, an interview with Richard Zimler, after his publishing Guardian of the Dawn online at http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/ sep/24inter1 (Seen 17/03/2006).

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Marranos hidden among the Penitentes the idea can be translated into concepts related to the make-do and as-if operations of the contraption to preserve a Jewish national memory (morasha) under the most trying of circumstances. These metaphorical operations can begin to be seen only with the instruments of discombobulation we have outlined above. • Tikkun ha’olam Repair of the world is the usual designation which is inclusive for all that follows, and has the sense of a pre-messianic sanctification to prepare for the end of times. In a world gone mad, where the impossible has happened repeatedly, the cut-off and confused Jewish mind seeks ways to adjust itself back into the contours of history so as to prepare for the return of normality. • Tikkun ha-goof Healing and curing the body of the individual or the family or even the community (the body politic) by means of physical and magical practices. For the most part, the male privileges of Talmudic study and synagogue worship are lost, leaving families and communities in the hands of women and their traditional but also unconventional techniques of maintenance and restoration • Tikkun ha-nefesh A kind of psychotherapy based on both rational principles of natural philosophy and of folk remedies usually the preserve of wise women and designated older women in a family, but also at a somewhat more sophisticated level this would be the consolation of philosophy or (in Rambam’s expression) a guide for the perplexed. The troubled soul, wracked by guilt, attempts here to work out its penitence and atonement within the contours of a Christian practice, at once plunging to the depths of sin through affirmation of the alien service (avodah zara) and redefining and recontextualizing it as a biblically valid, as with the worship of the Golden Calf or Esther’s marriage to Achasherus, emperor of pagan Persia. • Tikkun ha-shem A mystical notion that is based on the principle of repairing God’s own troubled soul, His sense of alienation from the Shechinah and the Spirit of Israel. By seeing God’s suffering in exile and loneliness, in need of human support, the Children of Israel mitigate the pangs of their own expulsion and persecution and give themselves a positive role in the hastening of the Mosheach. Re-enacting on their own persons the sufferings of the Christian messiah, they outrageously reveal their contempt for the persecuting faith and participate in the longing for salvation experienced by their fellow Penitentes. 205

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•

Tikkun ha-toladot In this concept of the healing or repair of history there is the functioning of midrash as an active verb transferred from the strict application to the interpretation and enhancement of sacred texts to that of events in the immediate world of social and political action. The aggadot of this interpretative exercise are, as always, shocking, grotesque and memorable.

But tikkun was not the only term that was at work in the mentality of the age. The desire to participate in the repair of the world and to inaugurate a time of messianic return to national Law and self-sufficiency in the Land of Israel was an ideal possible only to be sustained within a utopian vision. This kind of fixing-up, with these sense of correcting, completing, and concluding, also continues into enhancing and extending, so that we come back to the definition of midrashing used in this book: the midrash as a Jewish machine to accommodate Israel to history — and at the same time to adopt history to the Jewish Law. In later kabbalistic terms, it is the gathering up of sparks and the reintegration of energies hidden throughout the world, including the dark places on the other side, a process which was predicated on the notion of an explosive breaking of the original vessels, the myth of a fortunate failure, a felix culpa, as it were, that prompted the divine intervention, as it inspired the tillers in the field to hasten the harvest of pious deeds. There was a necessity, it seemed, not just for that shattering event at the inauguration of history in the world we live in (olam hazeh), but acts of devotion and cleaving to influence and transform events in the world to come (olam ha’bah), theurgic deeds and words. Still further, perhaps hidden in a few small enclaves, where the memory of traditional Sephardic learning and devotion to the Law had not been completely extinguished, there remained a notion of the churban, the disaster, the wreckage of the world of history, toladot, the tearing apart of the old systems of knowledge and rabbinical order in Sepharad, el-Andalus. That rupture had opened a vast abyss between the knowledge and interpretative techniques of Rambam, the rational principles of Saadya Gaon and Maimonides and their followers, and the crazy communities of Ramban and Kabbalah, with its visions, myths, nightmares, and persecuting institutions.

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THE CONTRAPTION THAT FAILED Presently, “superstition” and “superstitious” are terms associated with “dread and belief in the irrational.” In the original Latin, however, superstitio and superstitiosus had a different meaning. “Superstititon” was knowledge of a past event, and “superstitious” was that individual who had the peculiar gift to “testify” about an event in which he was not present. — José Faur119 Since the day that a government has come into power which issues cruel decrees against us and forbids us to enter into the “week of the son”[i.e., brit milah, circumcision], we ought by rights to issue a ruling forbidding Jews to marry and have children, so that the seed of Abraham our father would come to an end of its own accord. — Babylonian Talmud, Masechet Baba Batra 60b

The secret Jews hidden in the brotherhood of the Penitentes represent an extreme form of failed effort to preserve Judaism on the fringes of Catholicism during the period of the Spanish Empire, though above all they are a Christian sodality created by sincere and responsible Hispanic brothers to serve spiritual and pastoral care in their isolated communities in what is now the southwestern region of the USA. The failure begins in Spain with a miscalculation by those Sephardim who sought in the early part of the fifteenth century to create an alliance between themselves and certain Catholic families, particularly those in the nobility, to protect the property, wealth, and skills of the Jews and to share the status of the Christians in positions of prestige and power throughout the state and church. That the Hermandad Penitentes is not in itself a Jewish or Crypto-Jewish brotherhood — let alone a pseudo-Jewish or quasi-Hebrew organization — goes without saying. The failures we discuss here belong to a Sephardic ideal that became impossible to achieve once the events of the post-1390 world rolled on. Moreover, as we shall see, the failure in Jewish terms was only relative, and the attempt achieved something else in the more tolerant small communities where the Penitentes were able to thrive until early in the twentieth century. Thus, if any implications are to be drawn from this specific discussion and the book as a whole, they are: first, that the anousim calling for a respectful return to Judaism should be honoured, and second, that the 119

José Faur, The Horizontal Society: Understanding the Covenant and Alphabetic Judaism, Section 4, Introductory Remarks

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Penitentes should be seen in the light of their service to the community as well as for their creative development of their own Catholicism. It was believed that this alliance would develop a strategic fusion already begun in the so-called conviviencia of el-Andalus several centuries earlier, at a time when Judaism, it was fervently believed, could co-exist with both Christianity and Islam; but, paradoxically as the Reconquista drew towards its completion and the Golden Age of cooperation was fading away, groups of important Jewish and Christian families hoped to prosper in the new conditions emerging through the rest of Europe — because of the Renaissance and Reformation, in regard to trade and commerce, industry and technology, education and scientific advances, along with reforms and centralization of governance in church and state. The new legal but secret alliance would be based on a selected number of Jewish individuals from educated, wealthy, influential families converting to Catholicism who would then be given or be recommended for positions of authority in civil, military, ecclesiastical and other institutional orders. The fusion would also see newly-converted Jews marrying into established aristocratic households and wealthy land-owning hidalgo clans. The Catholic parties to this pact would gain not just immediate access to large amounts of money and increased influence themselves but they would also take part in the advancement of overseas business enterprises, intellectual and professional connections, and international power in the newly discovered lands and emerging trade-based empires. What was miscalculated by the parties to this alliance in this were: (1) the Inquisition and the Statutes of Purity of Blood, (2) the negative Catholic reaction to the Reformation at the Council of Trent, (3) the ordinary Jews forced to convert or to flee the Iberian Peninsula. These huge numbers of Jewish converts, whether voluntary or forced, were for the most part unprepared for their new life as Christians and their awkwardness, insincerity and cynical treatment of their new co-religionists did not go unnoticed. Their often ostentatious presence and success in many commercial, civic and educational fields previously denied to them by legal code generated a strong reaction against conversos that affected the efforts of the alliance to create the conditions expected for its success at home and abroad. However, after a very brief period of relative stability after the first generation of conversions, life became difficult and fraught with dangers for the New Christians, and the writing could be seen on wall for the practicing Jews as well. The exodus began a generation before the formal decree of 1492. The flight of so many Sephardim — sometimes it must have seemed as though all the small businessmen, peddlers, and moneylenders in the world had disappeared, along with the physicians, lawyers and other professionals — moreover weakened the power and influence of the parties to the alliance who had hoped to take advantage of their prestige both as former 208

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Jews and as New Christians. The changed circumstances caused many of the members of the alliance to seek to escape from Iberia. These families had hoped, not only to advance their own material, political and intellectual interests through a fusion with the Spanish élites in a Catholicism that was essentially tolerant and open to the enlightened ideas of Renaissance and Reformation, witness the spread of Erasmian ideas prior to the crackdown by the Inquisition, but to preserve traditional Sephardic learning and social organization based on rational Gaonic and Maimonidean principles, and thus to avoid the transformed Jewish communal governance and spirituality following the myths of kabbalistic magic and the rabbinical persecution of heresy. The escape could perhaps be back to Arab-speaking rabbinical communities in North Africa or the Levant or into more tolerant Christian lands on the other side of the Pyrenees, some Catholic, some Lutheran or Calvinistic. It also could, however, be to the distant overseas empires of Spain and Portugal where, they now hoped, the long arm of the Inquisition would not easily or efficiently reach or where a more relaxed civil regime would not prosecute the regulations of blood purity with the same vigour as in the metropolis. The hope then was that Spanish civilization, more familiar and comprehensible, would provide the refuge they were seeking. During the first two or three generations from 1390 individuals and families still hoped to be able to maintain a somewhat hidden Jewish life under the merely nominal pose of Catholicism, depending on the proximity of legal Jewish communities and their institutions and rabbinical leadership, giving them access to kosher foods, talmudic and other scholarship, and a sense of close social connections. By the time the Inquisition was established in the middle of the next century, it was evident that the old structural limitations on career advancement and development were not only still there but were made worse since New Christians were now subject to inquisitorial discipline and under constant suspicion of insincerity by the rest of society. When the order for expulsion was promulgated in 1492, escape entailed forgoing property, social positions, and family structures. Many secret Jews went along with the practicing Jews to Portugal, hoping that there the old tolerance would prevail, rather than to mix in with the unfamiliar and hostile Arabic-speaking communities to the East and with the very kind of restructured rabbinical groups they had sought to separate from in the first place. The mass forced conversion in 1497, in Portugal, while it gave some breathing space before inquisitorial rigour would be imposed and occasional avenues of escape, especially to the Spanish colonies in America following the union of the Catholic monarchies, did not resolve the essential difficulties. These problems are often overlooked in standard scholarship because it is assumed that Jews are Jews and Christians Christians, without taking into account the tensions between different concepts of Judaism hostile to one another since 209

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the time of the Maimonidean Controversies. As we have showed, a much wider range of options and categories was possible, and the best way to speak of the actual situation is to think of Fuzzy Jews as sets of incommensurable, indeterminate and unsteady groupings. Among Christians, too, there were not only New and Old Christians, but various groupings aware of, sympathetic to, and reacting against Protestant reforms, illuminationist agitation, and growing regressive anti-rationalism. Our focus now has to shift from a broad view tending to favour the European circumstances to one focussed on the New World. After several generations of relatively easy and tolerant settlement in Spanish and Portuguese America, when secret Jews could function with little concern for hostile or jealous agencies, branches of the Holy Office were set up in Peru, Cartagena and Mexico. This new fact on the ground necessitated further strategic manoeuvres by the remnants of the old alliance to avoid denunciations and persecutions. The code name usually employed to designate target groups in the society was “Portuguese” because most of the Marranos and Crypto-Jews had been Sephardim who were expelled from Castile to the closest neighbour and families who had moved from other kingdoms of pre-centralized Spain.120 When the Portuguese Inquisition was set up, it was far more virulent in its assault on hidden Judaizing families and communities than the Spanish Holy Office, which by the mid-sixteenth century had turned its attentions on to other kinds of heretics, violators of canon law, and enemies of the faith. In other words, most of these “Portuguese” New Christians were actually Spanish individuals only two or three generations in the other kingdom. They used their temporary bases in Madrid or Seville, for instance, to gain the necessary documents to migrate to South and Central America. In New Spain and other vice-royalties of the empire, the Inquisition did not put all its efforts into rooting out Judaizers.121 New Christians could avoid denunciation by moving from place to place, or by heading for out-of-theway settlements. Nevertheless, though the inquisitorial arrests, confiscations, and autos-da-fe tended to come in infrequent waves, as Hordes indicates, the suspicions and tensions were constant. In Mexico and Brazil, Crypto-Jews and Marranos moved further into the hinterlands, the northern fringes of the kingdom or the sertão, or at least kept moving about to avoid arrest. Another way to look at the situation is to consider the people who chose to convert for strategic purposes of the original alliance as taking a calculated risk. Those who accepted baptism did so not in order to separate totally from 120 121

Alberto Osorio Osorio, “Sinonimia luso-judaica” Maguén-Escudo no. 145 (2007) 14–19. See Appendix H, “The Abuse of the Conversos as ‘Judaizers’: When did it Begin?” in Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (New York, NY: Random House, 1995) pp. 1133–1136.

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their families, but to protect them and enhance their interests, to fuse with the Catholic families they either married into or became associated with as clients and patrons. They were hiding their national identity as Jews but not really giving up their Judaism or their commitment to the covenant and the Law. They believed that the formal Jewish community itself had already betrayed its real best interests and essential character, and that the alliance could maintain those interests and that character within a delicate mesh of compromise and dissimulation. It would be a temporary investment of some members of the family in a dangerous and risky enterprise. The circumstances changing radically in the course of the sixteenth and then into the seventeenth century, the nature of the separation became more acute. Judaism was illegal in Iberia and its European and overseas dominions and territories. The converted family members became cut off from rabbinical institutions, Hebrew knowledge and Jewish life. They were treated as secondclass citizens and Christians, under constant threat of denunciation by rivals, neighbours and other family members. These conditions continued even in the New World insofar as it replicated the structures of Iberian government and social politics. Another separation was required for those who could not accept the pressures or did not wish to keep moving about. Most New Christians sought to live in communities when they could, depending on one another for social support and commercial opportunity. Their attachment to the People of Israel (am yisroel) and the Law was at best sporadic and increasingly fragmentary and incoherent. A few cut themselves off still further, seeking to avoid a lapse into mysticism, obscurantism and ignorance, or complete assimilation into the Catholic hegemony. They travelled into the fringe areas, the backwards places, the deserts filled with ghosts and demons. This move was based on another miscalculation. They believed that by escaping from the tyrannical regime of the Spanish imperial government and an inquisitorial Church, they would also avoid the banalities and stupidities of a secret Jewish community that was based on messianic myths and superstitious folklore. Like the Children of Israel who left Eretz Mitzrayim, the dark and deadening slave tyranny of Egypt, they hoped to purge themselves in the wilderness and make the surviving population worthy of a new revelation and covenant. However, like the followers of Sabbatai Tzvi and other false messiahs, they found themselves in a darkness that was inexplicable: they engaged in crazy, antinomian acts, identifying profoundly with the otherness of the sin-filled desert, and thus burdened with intense, unbearable guilt. At the same time, in this distorted and bizarre experience, they found their participation in penitential exercises completely foreign and abhorrent to Jewish thinking gave them a protection and a comfort they could find nowhere else in the world. Such comfort, nevertheless, alas, was not only imperfect because founded on false assumptions, and temporary because unable 211

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to withstand totally and consistently the double assault of persecution and assimilation, but finally a form of madness — the madness, that is, as McGaha reminds us in regard primarily of Don Quixote de la Mancha himself, “of the prophets, visionaries, saints and mystics.”122 Another facet of this kind of cultural madness was the furor poeticus, as Jonathan I. Israel points out, thus indicating that the gloomy prognosis in the sentences we cited as the head-note to our introductory chapter can now be turned around entirely. Paradoxically, instead of the litany of negative events — the persecutions, the mass conversions, the expulsions — there was . . . a whole package of new elements: a much intensified political and historical awareness, a new involvement in poetry, music and drama, an urgent, if somewhat rambling quest to incorporate fragments of western philosophy and science into the emerging corpus of Jewish culture, all welded by a far more potent current of mysticism than had ever pervaded the Jewish world previously . . . Indeed, it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that post-Temple Jewish culture attained its highest degree of cohesion, as well as autonomy from Christendom and Islam, precisely in the centuries 1550–1750.123

122

123

McGaha, “Is There a Hidden Jewish Meaning in Don Quixote?” p. 182; here McGaha refers to Ruth Reichelberg, Don Quichotte ou le roman d’un Juif masque (Paris: Seuil, 1999). Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantalism, p. 71.

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CROSSCURRENTS AND UNDERCURRENTS

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This is the best kept secret in 500 years. The Spanish Inquisition and then the Mexican Inquisition kept a people in secret for five centuries. It is the tragic story of a people who have been so persecuted for so many years that they have hidden their identity as a secret for so long that they have forgotten who they are. — Grace Sarrano Fenn1

In this fourth chapter midway through the book we are going to balance two kinds of argument. In the first, focusing on the Penitentes themselves and their most striking rituals of self-mutilation and discipline, we will be asking how do they fit into the overall scheme of religious history, particularly from a phenomenological point of view. In the second argument, we take a survey of the historical place of Fuzzy Jews — that is, since legally no practicing Jews could enter or remain in the Spanish Empire, all the varieties of secret, suspected and pseudo-judaizers there could possibly be — in the New World. These two sections at once sum up the argument in the first three chapters and lay further groundwork for the discussions in the last three chapters.

1

Grace Sarrano Fenn, “Sephardim Hope Renewed” History of the Sephardim Anusim Sephardimn Hope International online at http://www.sephardimhope.org/Historyofthe SephardimAnusim (Seen 21/09/2004).

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SE C T IO N 1

THE HALF-WAY MARKERS

PENITENTES, THAIPUSAM, AND THE FILLIPINO CRUCIFIERS: ECSTASY, AGONY AND THEIR SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE AS FESTIVALS OF BLOOD AND PAIN They that are Christ’s have crucified their flesh. Galatians 5:24 Here he found happiness and peace in things which an effeminate age abhors most: mortification and penance. The Franciscan Book of Saints (1959) In the York plays the torment which Christ undergoes is indicative of the attempt to reduce his humanity to the feeling of unendurable pain and thus to make the pain dominate his whole being . . . Clifford Davidson2

William Wroth announces boldly at the beginning of his study of santos in the southwestern United States, “The idea of suffering as a means of purification is an integral part of every world religion.”3 Is he correct? In what follows I want to argue that, on the one hand, even where external rituals of pain and suffering seem to be similar, different cultures and religions handle these bloody events in quite distinct ways; and then, on the other hand, that some religions do not use suffering as a means to purification at all and, indeed, discourage their adherents from participating in any rites that hint in the most indirect ways at such painful rites. 2

3

Clifford Davidson, Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain (Aldershot, Hamps. and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007) pp. 150–151. William Wroth, “The Place of Penance in Early Christian Thought and Practice,” Images of Penance, Images of Mercy: Southwestern Santos in the late Nineteenth Century (Colorado Springs, CO: Taylor Museum for Southwestern Studies and Norman, OK and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991) p. 3.

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There are a few striking similarities between the phenomena of Penitentes’ self-flagellation and crucifixion during Holy Week (Semana Santa), South-Asian Hindu Thaipusam trance-like states of self-inflicted pain through spectacular acts, and Filipino Lenten rituals of self-crucifixion, or at least enough to make the juxtaposition and comparison fruitful; but also sufficient differences to clarify some of the specific features of the Penitentes. These religious phenomena are no doubt all specific to their regions and faith systems which form the matrix and context of their performance, but they also share something more fundamental which can be approached through a psychohistorical interpretation. Rather than a reductive reading as some psychoanalytical anthropologists tended to do in the first half of the twentieth century, the discussion here points to layers of complexity that are anything but reductive. On the one hand, the Penitentes reflect a situation in which, following Freud’s paradigm of the Primal Horde, the brothers feel rejected by the father — in the sense of both ecclesiastical and secular authorities — and consequently establish a new kind of Catholicism focused on Jesus the Father-God and a Holy Trinity consisting of the Father-Son, the Mother of Mercy, and Joseph the Earthly Nurturing Father; on the other, through a process of bricolage characteristic of isolated and marginalized communities, the brotherhood recreates the inherited residue of remembered religion and the matrix community of indigenous peoples (Pueblo Indians) into whom they intermarry and live conjointly. The meeting of these two creative processes — one an original variant on Tridentine and Baroque civilization, the other a product of folkloric culture and thus an assimilative and synthesizing enterprise based on necessity in hostile times — yields a dynamic social and psychological core that is subject to its own developmental variations over the course of the radical changes marking the history of the region in which the Penitentes operate. In addition, it should be clear that this region contains within it another element that constitutes a further impetus towards the specific changes that have occurred and the particularities of its valorizing of secrecy as a key sacralizing feature: put more simply, the very excitement and danger of having to keep the customs secret stimulates the brotherhood to innovative modes of worship and bonds the community into a close unit. These points will be discussed right after we set out the other two seemingly analogous cases.

THAIPUSAM Thaipusam with its kavadi and trance-like states demonstrates an influx of the divine precisely to the extent that the penitential devotees do not feel the pain caused by the knives and needles passed through their tongue and face and other parts of their body, as well as the ordeals of carrying a heavy apparatus 216

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and climbing long steep stairs. The form of the ritual we will examine is that performed among the emigrant Hindu worshippers who now form Tamil communities in Malaysia and Singapore. It was transported to what was then Malaya by Indian workers brought to the rubber plantations and first performed in 1888 at Batu Caves.4 These dramatic manifestations of faith (we may call them autos da fé) are performed by the devotees of Murugan or Muruga (another name for and manifestation of Lord Subramaniam or Subramanya, a son of Shiva)5 and are simultaneously affirmed by believers who observe the ritual and take part both through their spectatorship and their encouraging cries of “vel, vel” addressed to the deity. As vel is a round blade deeply associated with Murugan,6 the term has come by synecdoche to represent the god himself and the influx of the sacred generated by the ritual. Because Murugan is the granter of wishes, his devotees give their thanks and submit to penitential pains due to their inadequacy before such great favor. The acts are prepared for and continuous with fasting, chanting, and prayers. During visits to Penang, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, I observed the devotees come to the sacred places of the ritual as ordinary Hindus and then, after having prepared themselves through several days of celibacy and fasting, take off their street clothes, put on ritual garments, and begin chanting to inaugurate the necessary trancelike state, a status confirmed by a priest who circulates amongst the penitents and presses a mark on their foreheads to signal that they may now begin the self-infliction of pain and the wearing of the kavadi or other home-made paraphernalia.7 At Batu Caves outside Kuala Lumpur and at Chettiar Temple in Singapore’s Little India district, I watched these colorful and intense rituals, beginning with meeting some of the individual men at home before their drive to the temples where they transformed themselves into kavadi bearers by meditating themselves into trances. The metamorphoses were quick and complete. A recent western observer has aptly remarked, “This was an intense demonstration of belief and devotion” and added, confirming my own impressions of twenty-five years ago, “It was a public event, attended by 4

5

6

7

Siobhann Tighe, “Thaipusam: Faith, Endurance and Penance” BBC — Religion and Ethics online at http://www.bbc.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/holydays/thaipusam. This text is based on a programme in the BBC World Service series and is posted with color photographs. The god is also sometimes known as Thendayuthpani. For the background of the festival, the god and his worship in Singapore and India, see Sri Thenday, “Thaipusam” online at http://www. sttemple.com/STT/english/thaipusam. Dr. K. Ramathanan “tells us that the vel’s teardrop shape is a reminder of the ways in which Hindus should approach their faith,” cited in Jim Metzner, “Thaipusam — Vel/ Ritual ambience: Thaipusam celebration,” Pulse of the Planet, Program #2058 (January 2000) online at http://www.pulse planet.com/archive/Jan00/2058. Norman Simms, “Transformation of Mental Imagery: Three Festive Examples” Synthesis 8 (1981), 201–216.

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thousands, yet it appears that every individual was alone at some point, even amidst the throngs, communicating with their god.”8 Several points need to be isolated here for the sake of comparing Thaipusam with the two other festivals of pain being examined in this chapter. As we have just noted, the celebration involves a public gathering of people with largescale participation while at the same time each individual devotee who takes on the added burdens of the self-inflicted pain does so as an individual giving thanks and atoning for sins. It is claimed that “[k]avadi translates as Kavu + Adi and is a pole slung across the shoulder to evenly distribute the weight of whatever is being carried, usually in bundles on either ends of the pole.”9 These bundles consist of milk and honey that will be poured out as pujahs (offerings) when the devotees reach the shrine and walk three times around the statue of Murugan. In particular, the kavadi used in Southeast Asia is a metal contraption like a palanquin, somewhat like a heavy carapace of blades that puncture the shoulders, arms and other parts of the bearer’s body; it is brightly colored and often decorated with flowers, peacock feathers and streamers to call attention to itself. Bells are also attached to the kavadi to announce the coming of the penitent and his embodiment of the divine through the pain that is not felt except as ecstasy. The kavadi-bearers and other penitents with vel or other blades piercing their cheeks, tongue or chest, move from a temple near a river along a designated path, sometimes including a steep hill or flight of stairs,10 and then back to the point of origin, with spectators all along the route traversed. The date is set in the month of Thai (January-February), at full moon and when the constellation of Pusam is in the ascendant. It is on this date, according to myth, that the vel was first given to Lord Murugan by his mother. Participants in the festival report on the pain experienced during the ceremony, even when knives, skewers and other heavy blades are used. According to a recent BBC report, Many of these pilgrims are pierced with two skewers (or ‘vels’ — symbolic spears); one through the tongue, and one through the cheeks . . . Still others go even further 8

9

10

“Thaipusam — A Hindu Festival,” Range of Vision: Wanderings in the East/West World (2003) online at http://glennh.tripod.com/wa_sing_tpsm. Anon., “Thai Poosam Kavady” from Wikipedia online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Thai_Poosam _Kavady (last modified 18 Feb. 2007) According to well-known facts given on Wikipedia, “The temple at the Batu Caves, near Kuala Lumpur, often attracts over one million devotees and tens of thousands of tourists. The procession to the caves starts at the Maha Mariamman Temple in the heart of the city and proceeds for 15 kilometers to the caves, an 8-hour journey culminating in a flight of 272 steps to the top.” See “Thaipusam” on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Thaipusam. This anonymous entry (last modified on 23 February 2007) contains many color photographs.

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and pull heavy chariots fastened to metal hooks in the skin of their backs. The skin tugs as they go, and they grunt and growl. The devotees who go to these extremes say they don’t feel any pain because they are in a spiritual and devotional trance which brings them closer to Lord Murugan.

In other words, while the pain exists as an essential part of the ritual, it is not experienced as unbearable, but either manifest only as physical signs or not registered by the devotee who is in an ecstatic trance. Insofar as the pain is anticipated and recalled, as one participant put it, “The endurance of what you are doing is enough in itself, and the fact that you are not going to suffer pain is proof of his [the god’s] presence — or one of the proofs of his presence.”11 Sri Thenday explains, “The benefits that the devotee gains from offering a Kavadi to the Lord are a million-fold greater than the little pain that he inflicts upon himself.” The suffering diminishes in response to the new spiritual state temporarily entered into when the worshipper “gets so God-intoxicated that his inner spiritual being gets awakened.” The duly prepared devotee finds therefore that each pain the body endures “reminds him of the Lord” and he feels the close presence of the divine, as Sri Thenday claims: The Kavadi-bearer enjoys a high state of religious fervour. He dances in ecstasy. His very appearance is awe-inspiring; there is divine radiance on his face. Devotees often experience the state of feeling united with the Lord. Sometimes the Lord enters them and possesses them for some time.

FILIPINO FLAGELLANTS AND SELF-CRUCIFIERS According to Aristotle, intellectual cognition on the part of human beings cannot be achieved without phantasma, i.e., images of corporeal things.12

Another seemingly analogous festival of pain13 occurs in the Philippines. It contains some similarities to the devotional exercises performed by the devotees 11

12

13

The speaker is “Carl”, an Australian, who claims to have worn the kavadi fourteen times; cp BBC, “Thaipusam”, Faith and Ethics, cited above. Shlomo Pines, “The Philosophical Purport of Maimonides’ Halachic Works and the Purport of Tne Guide of the Perplexed” in Pines and Yovel, eds., Maimonides and Philosophy, p. 11. I am calling this and the other festivals discussed here “festivals of pain” rather than “festivals of blood” which is the term I use in my book-length study Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice in Biblical and Classical Literature (London, Ont.: Sussco, 2007). This

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of Lord Murugan in the Thaipusam festival in Malaysia and Singapore just discussed. For instance, on Good Friday in April 2006 there were at least eleven individuals nailed to crosses in San Pedro Cutud, a farming district about fortyfive miles north of Manila. According to an AP report, crucifixions also took place that year in Kapitangan where “two men wearing long wigs and tin crowns were nailed to the cross before 1,000 spectators.”14 In other parts of the world, Europe, Israel, and North America, Catholics symbolically enact with varying degrees of intensity the Passion, sometimes with red ribbons symbolizing blood, sometimes with small incisions cut to draw a drop of real blood, and sometimes with a more realistic illusion created by a mixture of make-up and actual suffering. These traditions go back hundreds of years but tend to have their beginnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period of the transition from medieval to Tridentine Catholicism.15 These Filipino Christian worshippers, however, seem to take their imitation of Christ literally in order to share in the agony of their god on the cross, even if only for a few moments, and the purpose of the ceremony is not to avoid the sufferings of the body through absorption into the mythic ecstasy of the holiday but precisely to offer that agony as the most extreme as a gift of faith. Just as Jesus Christ took the sins of the world on himself and suffered the pangs of humiliation and death to redeem mankind from its otherwise inevitable damnation, so the Christian penitent here shares in the agony of Christ’s ordeal — as much as a sinful mortal human being can do — and so atones for his own failings which are the cause of God’s own mysterious death on the cross. Or so it seems, or at least so the tourist operators who want you to visit the Philippines want you to believe. From their perspective, the entire occasion is structured around these faux crucifixions. If we look at what actually goes on, however, we will have to note that these similarities, which can be valuable in our assessment of how the pains endured by participants is woven into the very fabric of the festivals celebrated, actually make sense only when we can see them as points where the analogies break down altogether, and mark instead very different kinds of human experiences.

14

15

is because in Thaipusam, despite the many piercing blades used, the trance-state seems to prevent the shedding of blood at all. Nevertheless, in both the Philippines and the southwestern United States, flagellants and self-crucifiers seek to shed blood in imitation of Christ’s Passion. Fernando Sepe, “Devotees Nailed to Cross in Philippines”, 4 April 2006, Associated Press byline online at http://www.com/news/world/asia/articles/2006/04/14/filipino_devotees_ nailed. A combined Associated Press, Reuters and CNN report for 10 April 1998 under the title “Somber Rituals Mark Global Observance of Good Friday,” CNNinteractive: World News online at http:edition.cnn.com/WORLD/Europe/9804/10/good.Friday.

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As Nicholas H. Barker points out, the analogy between the Filipino selfmortifiers and those performers elsewhere seems most valid until the 1960s when, he says, “the renaissance [in spiritual performances following the end of World War II and the granting of independence to the nation] incorporated a new, contiguous ritual: crucifixion by nailing.”16 The actions of religious selfmortification17 as part of a nominally Christian festival may be more or less elaborate, and range from actual nailing to a wooden cross to modifications that extend from standing on a platform to ease the stress on the body to being bound by cords to the cross-bars of the cross, as well as various kinds of public and private flagellation, these latter performed by all classes in society. However, in the Philippines the first known crucifixions using nails — that is, actual bloody rites rather than symbolic re-enactments using ropes or even surrogates, such as carved statues or paintings — only took place in the early 1960s, and were quickly seized upon by various external groups — Filipino nationalists, tourist operators and government officials — to exploit the curiosity of urban middle-class intellectuals and overseas visitors. As a consequence, the popularity of these faux crucifixions overwhelmed the more traditional flagellation rituals and gave an imposed meaning to the whole set of phenomena associated with Lenten celebrations in the islands. Yet even then, despite this public relations campaign to advertise a supposedly unique local custom as the essence of Filipino spirituality, there is a distinct gap between what the publicity brochures and newspaper reports claim as the meaning of the crucifixions — as atonements for sin — and what the actual performers claim in interviews, or at least most of them because there are a few instances of actors being paid to perform several times during the celebrations in different places or even of pornographic film-makers using the occasion to take advantage of the audience’s responses to planted stars engaged in obscene acts. Mostly the persons who take part in the crucifixions reject the idea that they are atoning for sins. Instead they offer reasons based on heterodox Catholic theological goals — to participate in the mystical ecstasy of Christ on the Cross, to give a public display of their intense faith, to validate their own beliefs despite negative statements by priests — or on more local non-Christian traditions — to reinforce their healing powers as shamans. As Aristotle claims, in regard at least to the non-Jewish imagination which he probably was unaware of, the 16

17

Nicholas H. Barker, “The Revival of Religious Self-Flagellation in Lowland Christian Philippines” available online from the Program on Education and Training, East-West Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI 96848, USA at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~edu/ ~millado/flagellationfolder/flagellation; with a notice “To be published in the forthcoming volume Religious Revival in Contemporary Asia edited by Naimah Talib and Bernhard Dahm ISEAS, Singapore, 1997”. On the background to the term mortificare, see Dawn Perlmutter, “The Sacrificial Aesthetic: Blood Rituals from Art to Murder” Anthropoetics 5:2 (Winter 2000) 4.

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mind needs phantasmata to focus on if it is to think about ideas. Though this principle remains strong in Catholicism, especially in the Tridentine reforms, Maimonides and other forms of rational Judaism develop techniques that work by concentration on words, or rather on processes of abstracting from words their deepest, innermost ideas. That some of these performances include actors in the part of Roman soldiers who nail the individuals to their crosses and wear costumes imitating ancient uniforms suggests that the Filipino sinakulo (passion play) has a certain affinity with medieval mystery plays, but in these modern ritual dramas the main point is not to illustrate the mystery of the historical moment when the sacrament of the Eucharist became operative in human life — and hence the focus is on the actor playing the role of Jesus Christ — but to enhance the individual act of atonement in the pious worshippers. In the passion plays there is a multi-layered presentation of religious time and experience. For this reason what each Christian experiences in the Eucharistic moment is supposed to be the physical flesh and blood in the wafer and wine of the Mass. But experienced in what way? Is the Real Presence seen and heard as a fictional representation of the biblical drama in the mind’s eye as though it were part of the actual, material world? Or is it somehow internalized and understood to be a moral and spiritual lesson in humility and selflessness? Where Protestant rationalism leans towards various understandings of a symbolic, allegorical or ceremonial experience, Catholicism still asks for faith in the actual and literal trans-substantiation (while Anglicans favor a compromised con-substantiation). In these extreme Filipino exercises the distance between sacramental mystery and private experience seems to be collapsed to a point of near zero equivalence: the worshipper attempts to become what Jesus experienced when he was incarnated as sinful, mortal man in order to approach through almost unendurable human pain the divine in Christ. If the self-crucifixion were a normal, historical development of the flagellation rites, which themselves derived in some developmental process from the Franciscan traditions brought to the Philippines in the sixteenth century by the Spanish colonists, then we could understand these modern rites as continuous with the purposes of the earlier “discipline”. Citing Dario Sabbatucci (1987),18 Barker writes: Aside from vicarious participation in the passion of Jesus Christ, who was flagellated (Matthew 27:26; Mark 15:15; John 19:1) on Maundy Thursday, prior to his crucifixion and death on Good Friday, corporeal subjugation was intended to catalyse the transition from a life devoted to gratification of bodily desires to a higher sanctified life in the spirit.

18

Dario Sabbatucci, “Mortification” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed., Mircea Eliade, vol. 10 (New York: Macmillan, 1987) 113–115.

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This mystical moment of rising to and then cleaving to the divine, in one sense, is so extreme as to be blasphemous in its audacity and heretical in its search for a physical proof of what should normally be accepted on faith alone. Ecclesiastical authorities rejected the ceremonial acts as shocking and unacceptable at first, although after nearly half of a century they now tolerate the phenomena and in some cases seek to profit from the popularity. Above all because curious tourists enjoy the spectacle, the crucifixions have become accepted as part of the national culture. As we shall see later in regard to the Penitentes, the modern ritual seems to be a substitution of energeia for enargeia, to use key ancient Greek terms for related rhetorical kinds of imaginative experience. The men (very rarely women) who perform self-flagellation and crucifixion in the Philippines perhaps have some of the same Franciscan influences behind them as the Penitentes in the southwestern United States, and even some of the same religious organizations in that the Asian colony was in its foundations part of New Spain and visited by Mexican-based friars and government officials, as well as merchants, who divided their duties between the two Spanish colonies. But unlike the Penitentes, whose performance during Holy Week is a part of a year-long activity of doing good deeds (caridad) for each other and their community, these Filipino actors, like the devotees of Lord Murugan, do not form a brotherhood or recognize one another in their ordinary lives. Groups may gather to put on a spectacle and communities may cooperate in the staging of these religious shows, but, unlike the Hispanic rituals, the crucifiers do not act on behalf of their community. The modern Filipino custom, in spite of government tourist board brochures and newspaper accounts, has nothing to do with penitence. Barker is quite emphatic about this. Throughout the course of my anthropological fieldwork, conducted in Pampanga province periodically since 1984, no adult flagellant has ever volunteered penance as an explanation of ritual performance. Moreover, if I suggested expiation of sin as a possible rationale, the idea was refuted.

Barker adds that this is the experience as well of two other field workers, Alfredo Evangelista and Fernando Zialcita. In fact, Zialcita contends, “[n]ot even in preparation for this ritual, do the flagellants go to confession. Even the prayers used do not suggest a spirit of contrition.” What is brought up by the performers themselves when they can be brought to focus on their actions is the term darame, which according to Barker, means “to share suffering, in particular the suffering of Christ in his passion.” Examined more closely, these ceremonies reveal themselves to be quite other than what official accounts assign them to be, in Barker’s terms, “a contractual sacrifice, based on a vow (panata) to God, sworn for a fixed period, usually between five and fifteen years, often during 223

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a crisis or time of difficulty, most commonly the illness of close kin.” In this way, whatever historical connections there might be to Franciscan or earlier Italian flagellant traditions brought by the Spaniards, this Filipino custom seems more like the Thaipusam festival than the Hispanic Penitentes rites. Where it differs from what has been discussed in regard to the organized ordeals in Singapore and Malaysia, however, is in the nature of the contractual obligations undertaken by individuals but which are made and passed on through families. Barker explains, again based on his own fieldwork and the research of Zialcita and others: the panata acts as an ongoing relationship with the divine, a spiritual investment for the benefit of the entire family, not just the votary or his specified beneficiary . . . As a result, a vow is often hereditary, passed from father to son . . . [or] a close male relative will assume the burden of responsibility.

For the Penitentes the obligations are not to and through the family but to the brotherhood and it is the brotherhood which serves the community historically in lieu of an effective and sympathetic ecclesiastical establishment. As we shall see, whether because of outright hostility on the part of the Church or simply because there were no priests or friars in the region, the brotherhood not only had to take up the burdens of their own spiritual and pastoral care, but did so with a sense of urgency and secrecy; that which was vital to the life of the people could not be revealed to church or government because those institutions would not recognize or allow the Hermandad to function in the way the brothers believed necessary. This gap between the understanding of the performers and the officials self-appointed to explain the customs to the wider public in the Philippines contrasts with the radical disjunction between the spiritual intensity of the Penitentes and the ecclesiastical and civil authorities who misunderstand and heap scorn on the performances and the difference provides a basic clue to the nature of the two societies. Thus there are at least five factors to make this version of the festival of pain worthy of our attention in order to establish a backdrop against which to begin our main discussion of the Penitentes: •

•

First, self-mortification in the Philippines until the 1960s did not include the kind of crucifixions using nails that caused real suffering and on occasion death; it consisted mainly in flagellant exercises, some in public spectacles and some (usually for the educated and middle-classes) in private. Second, again to cite Barker, Although conscious and deliberate, the participatory revival of religious self-flagellation in the Philippines lacked organization. Flagellants did not form brotherhoods or fraternities . . . [and therefore] the ritual itself is not, at least explicitly, a form of social activism or political protest . . . 224

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•

•

•

Third, before the twentieth century, the practices by Filipino “upper class” flagellants was indoors, in private, and thus with a degree of secrecy; something which emerged again during the resistance to American occupation and Japanese rule, indicating a potentiality for the kind of covert development that occurred in the southwestern United States among the Penitentes. Fourth, Barker and other observers of the Filipino ritual who have also interviewed participants conclude that self-mortification is practiced as “a crucial means of acquiring sacred power.” Whereas the flagellation practice is an older, more traditional rite, and often carried out in humility and as a self-sacrificing oblation, with the participant wrapping his face in a cloth to mask his identity, in an attempt to keep the special relationship to God in fulfillment of his vow a private affair, the self-crucifiers do all they can to publicize their performance. For them, then, this sacred power is sought after for two reasons usually: (a) as “a genuine source of individual pride and strength” and (b) for use in shamanic healing. Penitentes, as we shall soon see, share some of the qualities of humility with the Filipino flagellants, but not in an individualized relationship to the deity with whom they share their suffering. Fifth, unlike the devotees in Thaipusam, the Filipino self-mortifiers do not enter into a trance in order to attain a state of ecstatic analgesic, that is, painlessness; they seek to endure the suffering of their self-inflicted acts as far as possible before fainting or screaming to be let free. The more pain they can endure the more potent the power they achieve for later healing, whether as shamanic agents or as intercessors on behalf of their relatives — and if they are advertising themselves as faith-healers, the greater their reputations for lasting a long time on the cross. Indicative of the nonChristian aspects to the public ritual is the report from certain informants, such as Leyte, according to Barker, that ultimately the power to heal does not come from Christ himself. It may be dispensed . . . by malevolent spirits who take possession of the body of Christ between his death and resurrection, and whom, once unleashed, roam the material world in a state of agitated excitement. It is these spirits, known personally to faith-healers, that must be confronted and challenged in dangerous places or via dangerous acts, if sacred power is to be successfully harnessed.

Ironically, it was this kind of demonic activity that Penitentes were accused of promoting by their detractors and by sensationalist film-makers and journalists in the first half of the twentieth century.

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PENITENTES OF THE SOUTHWESTERN UNITED STATES Therefore shall ye lay up these words in your heart and in your soul; and ye shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them to your children. Deuteronomy 11:18

What is the purpose of such rituals of suffering, these festivals of pain? Are they attempts to recreate in the theatre of oneself the same actions that set the scheme of salvation in motion? Do they celebrate, as a memorial drama, the things that were done on behalf of the believer-worshipper? Maybe they are signs — ambiguous and transformative at the same time — that inscribe the suffering self into the Book of Life? Or are they outrageous and idolatrous performances of avoda zara, pagan distortions of what is true and divine? In Jewish tradition, it is not paganism per se that is feared and eschewed, but indications within the rabbinical community of idolatrous actions and predelictions. Thus the wearing of tfillin, a word that means prayers, that is, binding leather things about the arms and forehead with small boxes containing liturgical passages, are signs (semim): they do not represent images of spirits or gods or sacred things — they are remembrances of the process of prayer itself and of all that the Law stands for in Jewish life. Though there were strong connections between the Spanish settlers in the two regions of the world where today Christian (or at least christianized) self-crucifying rituals are still practiced, there is no evidence that the customs we have just described for the Pacific island republic have any relationship with the Penitentes in the American southwest which this book is about. Historical evidence shows that though secret Jews also went directly from Iberia or via Mexico to the Philippines, their stay was short-lived in the Pacific territory and their influence probably miniscule at best. Adverse conditions in the Philippines cut off the development of any sustained Crypto-Jewish or Marrano communities. As Eva Uchmany shows, these conditions included the competition of two inquisitorial agencies, one in Mexico (the Spanish) and one in Goa (the Portuguese), effectively discouraged any secret Jews from continuing to live there after the first generation of settlement. In addition, long distances and the precariousness of the economic base worked against the New Christians we know of who might have sought similar modes developed in Mexico from attempting similar strategies in the Philippines: on the one hand, there possibly could have been relatively stable, small communities of secret Jews developing in the Philippines as there were in Mexico; but family connections and communications across the Pacific were more difficult to maintain than the more frequent shipping schedules across the Atlantic — and even then, at best, 226

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the sporadic arrival of Crypto-Jewish merchants, travelers, and government agents brought only an irregular flow of supporting ideas to the precarious New Christian groups in Mexico. On the other hand, the Philippines did not have a relatively open hinterland to which fugitives from the Inquisition could flee or suspected and nervous judaizers could disappear from view as existed in the areas now comprising the south-western United States. From the Philippines, secret Jews could at best flee to India, Japan or a few enclaves in China, but these shifts in space required passage through fairly tight customs and bureaucratic controls. In brief, with no contiguous connections, historical or geographical, the two crucifying rituals have at best a heuristic relationship. Their differences point to the uniqueness of the Penitentes in New Mexico. The Penitentes, like the current performers of extreme imitations of Christ’s Passion in the Philippines, show their piety and approach the divine through the experience of pain. They imitate Christ’s Passion and the humiliations and torments associated with the crucifixion in order to experience as intently and directly as possible the sacramental meaning and function of the ritual. As part of a brotherhood in the southwestern United States where they have developed — and redefined themselves several times over the past four hundred years — Los Hermanos Penitentes or La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno play a key role in the spiritual, social, and economic life of the small mostly Hispanic communities in which they are found. The strikingly intense acts of self-flagellation and crucifixion are not the defining features of the brotherhood; those would be charitable good works, pious devotions, and mutual aid, particularly in the formative periods when these communities were new and sparsely settled, at long distances from the centers of religious and civil authority, and poorly served by the friars who were nominally in charge of their pastoral care: for as one hermano is reported to have answered, “Iban par a las moradas porque no habí clero católico” (They go to the moradas because there was no Catholic clergy).19 While the many acts of charity performed throughout the year (cosas de caridad) bind together the community as a sacred entity — the morada, as the physical “abode” of the meetings and ceremonies, but also by extension the people involved and what they do and hence the community of believers as a collective sacred process of relationships — it is the display of sacred agony that provides the focal point of all other acts and activities. Susan Verdi Webster has studied the development of penitential confraternities in Mexico during the sixteenth century,20 and her findings help us situate 19

20

Alberto López Pulido, The Sacred World of the Penitentes (Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000) p. 11. Susan Verdi Webster, “Art, Ritual, and Confraternities in Sixteenth-Century New Spain: Penitential Imagery at the Monastery of San Miguel, Huejotzingo” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas No. 70 (1997) 5–43.

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the history of the Penitentes in the northern provinces of New Spain that eventually became Arizona, New Mexico and southern Colorado. To set the group even more deeply into its historical context, we need to establish clearly that, in the words of Virginia Reinburg, “[e]arly modern Catholic religiosity tended to be manifested publicly, collectively, and in acts rather than words, and participation in ritual was especially important to confraternal piety.”21 Reinburg synthesizes a number of important studies on this kind of penitential confraternity22 to indicate that the members of these lay brotherhoods “participated weekly or daily in liturgical activities, processions, and collective prayer.” In urban centers of Catholic Europe, such as Marseilles, the confraternities performed “colorful rites” such as flagellation and “the annual foot washing ceremony on Maundy Thursday.” In Venice and other Italian cities, where the fraternities were often known as scuole, the groups, according to Joann Zimmerman, “existed for the purposes of religious self-improvement, charitable deeds, and general fellowship” and “had incorporated self-flagellation as part of their regime.”23 In other words, the essential character of the Penitentes is not extraordinary within Counter-Reformation Catholicism, neither in its spiritual praxis nor in its social function. Yet it remains an independent formation created by a particular social group living under particular historical circumstances. The main differences between these other penitential confraternities and the brotherhood of the Penitentes, as we have already hinted, reside in the nonurban, non-bourgeois base set in a remote and isolated part of the Spanish Empire and then further marginalized by its location within a hostile American Protestant culture. What is distinct is, neither their practice of self-mortification nor their role in providing social cohesion in an early modern community, but, rather, their extension of the self-flagellation rites to faux crucifixions, and in developing the social functions into those areas of religiosity that could not be carried out by an ecclesiastical institution. Again, as we shall see, the intensification of penitential rituals did not merely fill in the space otherwise left vacant when their were no friars or priests to supervise and perform the liturgical and sacramental rites of the church; the Penitentes developed a new theology to rationalize their actions verging on what the mainstream Catholic authorities at first found shockingly close to, if not already, heretical. This rationalization moreover did not appear out of the blue, as it were, or manifest an untrained, folk misunderstanding of orthodox Catholic doctrine. It expressed a number of occluded aspects of the early group’s historical constituency that, 21

22 23

Virginia Reinburg, a review of Andrew E. Barnes, The Dimension of Piety: Associative Life and Developmental Change in Penitent Confraternities of Marseille (1490–1792) in Journal of Social History (22 March 1999). See Reinburg, notes 1–3 for a list of the relevant titles that appeared in the 1980s. Joann Zimmerman, “Scuole Grandi” online at http://www.bellereti.com/jzimm/Venice/ Scuole.

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in other parts of Mexico and Hispanic sectors of the American territory, were usually suppressed, self-censored or denied by the inheritors of traditions who lived in almost daily fears of Inquisitional discovery and punishment. Our view of the Penitentes therefore needs to be sensitized rather than sanitized;24 that is, it is important for us to understand and respect the role of secrecy within the brotherhood, rather than attempting to whitewash the vital and dynamic role of these “alien” factors

ENARGEIA VERSUS ENERGEIA The heroes on the stage must show feeling, must express their sufferings, and give free course to nature. Any appearance of art and constraint represses sympathy . . . I am convinced that the gladiatorial shows were the chief reason why the Romans never attained even to mediocrity in their tragedies. In the bloody ampitheatre the spectators lost all acquaintance with nature.25

We mentioned in an earlier chapter that performance of false crucifixions represents a creative crossing over of enargeia and energeia, that is, of intensity of representation of an imitated action and the energy of the desired religious effect. In the eighteenth century, at the height of the Aufklärung, the German Enlightenment, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing tried to distinguish between the kinds of representation possible in the sister arts of painting and poetry, and thus set out the parameters of aesthetic discussions of such representations as a category that enfolded beauty and the sublime. The famous statue of the Trojan priest Laocoon and his sons being strangled to death in the grasp of two enormous serpents seemed to encapsulate — in its agony, ugliness and beauty — the very essence of the problem — the conjunction, even the merging, of terrible suffering and transcendent and ecstatic beauty. Lessing’s Laocoon is, in a sense, the beginning of all such theoretical debates. Over the past century, these discussions have taken into account the insights of anthropology and psychoanalysis. In the argument that follows, however, 24

25

On the distinction between these two terms, sensitize and sanitize, see Elie Wiesel’s speech “Remembrance and Hope” delivered at the Holland and Knight Charitable Trust’s Holocaust Remembrance Project dinner at the Fairmont Hotel, Washington, D.C.. Excerpts were published in The Washington Times, 25 July 2006. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Ellen Frothingham (New York: The Noonday Press/Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961) p. 29.

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I swerve away from the late twentieth-century theories that underlie much of these modernist and post-modernist thinkers, such as René Girard26 and Dawn Perlmutter27 in that my position is not an attempt to project back into the rituals we are studying the grotesque and narcissistic displays of contemporary cults and art “scenes”. Let me explain my position more fully.28 On the one hand, the kind of anthropology and psychoanalytics invested in those arguments depends on a false separation of high from popular culture; in my argument, however, no such separation exists because we are dealing with small, isolated communities that develop in their own way at a physical distance from the centers of civilization but believe that they are continuing to remain loyal and faithful to the ideals they grew up with or know through received memories — and therefore that their adaptations to specific localized conditions is part of the ordeal they have been chosen to experience in order to prove their spiritual and social worth. On the other hand, the aesthetics and social dimensions of the paradigm in which Perlmutter works is not only embedded in contemporary American and western urban elite cultures, but premised on a very thin and ahistorical base; whereas what I am attempting to do is create a thick context of historical circumstances, a matrix of iconographic, theological and historiographical continuities between the small Penitente communities and the more developed regions of Mexico and the larger context of Iberian and European culture of the Counter-Reformation. Because the Penitentes shared with the broader civilization of Mexico and all territories of the Spanish Empire the philosophical bases in late medieval Catholicism of Aristotelianism, a general position that had been shifted in the northern Protestant lands towards a more Platonistic and then later mechanistic view, we must find our bearings within the psychology of Aquinism and the aesthetics that grew out of it Renaissance artistic traditions. It would, indeed, be precisely against that Aristotelian position that opposition and misunderstandings would arise, even if apparently expressed in terms of national and racial prejudices. Larry J. Feinberg sees this Aristotelian base as encapsulated in the philosopher’s statement: Numquam sine phantasmate intelligit anima, “the soul can understand nothing without phantasms.”29 What this “visually-privileged 26

27 28

29

René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). Perlmutter, “The Sacrificial Aesthetic: Blood Rituals from Art to Murder” 1–10. My main source for the following discussion is Alessandra Manieri, L’Immagine poetica nella teoria degli antichi: phantasia ed enargeia (Pisa + Romas: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 1998). Larry J. Feinberg, “‘Imagination all compact’: Tavolette and Confraternity Rituals for the Condemned in Renaissance Italy” Apollo (May 2005) online at http://www.findarticles. com/p/articles/mimOPAL/is 519161/ain159520205.

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scheme” establishes, according to Feinberg, is that “all impressions of the world (and knowledge) pass through the bodily senses to a mechanism located in the heart, called the proton organon, which transforms them into phantasmata — phantasms or mental images — perceptible to the soul,”30 and consequently to one degree or another thereafter, followers of Aristotle would believe that “thought . . . is little more than the reception, distribution, and creation of images.” Hence Thomas Aquinas’ dictum: intelligere sine conversione ad phantasmata est (animae) prater naturam, “it is impossible to think without the soul converting nature into images.” This Doctor of the Church refines Aristotle’s position into two processes, a response to sensual impulses from the outside that registers them as phantasmata, and a creative activity within the mind where images interact and develop new forms. Ioan P. Couliano therefore sees the medieval and Renaissance arts of memory, studied by Francis Yates, as emerging as “a comprehensive, visually-based mnemonic system” dependent upon “‘the Aristotelian principle of the absolute precedence of the phantasm over speech and of the phantasmic essence of the intellect’” (cited in Feinberg). There are two alternative systems of epistemology and psychology to this Aristotelian tradition. We will look at them here, but then, in later chapters, move beyond such medieval rhetorical and philosophical categories to find some more modern scientific and psychohistorical explanations for how such textual images are experienced as real events in “the mind’s eye.” One alternative system derives from Plato and is developed in NeoPlatonism in the Renaissance in a direction that is simultaneously more mystical and more materialistic; that is, where ideas — little pictures that are purified spiritual essences of the higher reality that descend to earth and into the minds of human beings — play an active, dynamic and creative role in the formation of intellectual and cultural life, as well as the emotional experiences of individuals; and these active spirits have a certain physicality about them, too, which makes them part of the real-life experiences of the world. The other derives from rabbinical thinking about the inherited texts of the Hebrew Bible and especially in the form of readings given under the name of midrash. In this view, the essential matrix of the created universe is verbal and hence both thought and language are linguistic processes rather than representative or symbolic images; it is not just that God created the world through his fiat, his verbal pronouncement, so that the creation is a vast dynamic realization of divine speech, but that in particular He created men and women in His image, so that they what they think and feel, act and create are also linguistic phenomena. Rather than being primarily names, words are actions; and if little images, then 30

Another term for the proton organon is hegemonikon, the main directional center of the mind, or as it is called today: the executive center.

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moving pictures seething with creative energies, always shifting, growing and transforming themselves. This brings us back to enargeia and energeia, and then a series of related technical words: ekphrasis, phantasia and ludibrium These terms used at the beginning of this section — enargeia and energeia — derive from the theory of rhetoric and art history have at first a fairly fluid range of associations with imagination, fantasy, realism and reality. As well as truth in the juridical and philosophical senses, the search for an intense verbal illusion of sensual and existential reality leads orators and poets to imitate the processes they seem to see in visual artists, especially painters and sculptors. By using these terms, we come into contact with the theory and practice of poetry and architecture, painting and sculpture, preaching and orating, worship and meditation; and we attach ourselves to the discussions from ancient through medieval times into the Renaissance on the nature of truth, fantasy, invention, and imagination.

ENARGEIA The usual meaning of this Greek word is vividness. Sometimes the word is translated by Roman orators with some variation on representation or realism. It is a term from rhetorical theory that designates an intensity of figurative speech so powerful — overwhelming — that it persuades its audience (often juridical) to believe in the truth, literal and substantial, of the argument they are hearing. The theory presumes that the power of the words used in a public setting ignites such strikingly vivid pictures in the mind of the audience that they feel this imaginary experience as though it were a real, present, and historical event. Clearly it designates what Maimonides would understand as the imaginative faculty that underlies mythical thinking.

In regard to the Penitentes, for specific historical reasons, the hermanos undertake to realize this rhetorical figure in real time and place by articulating the suffering of Christ on their own persons. In the absence of ordained priests to legitimate the Mass through the sacrament of the Real Presence, the brothers embody in themselves an imitatio christi. At the same time as it continues the disciplinary rites of penitence seen in self-flagellation and mutual infliction of ritualized bloody pain, the inscription of real blood on real flesh occupies the cultural space otherwise taken by symbolic or representational acts and images. How so? The brothers collectively re-enact the Passion from within an imitatio christi that is experienced by one man on behalf of all, synecdochally extended through all participants in the Holy Week ceremony, those who whip themselves or each other, and those who observe, as well as those not in attendance who receive the benefits through communal worship before and after the ceremonies. 232

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It is not that the deception or illusion of the crucifixion convinces the audience to experience at second or third hand a work of art — as occurs in a painting, sculpture or dramatic performance — but through a consolidation of real pain and the flow of real blood. This real pain collapses time and space so that the brothers are for a moment of ecstatic worship at one with Christ, in the same sense as they are when the worshipper in the Eucharist communicates with the Real Presence of Christ — not as a symbolic or iconic reproduction of the affective reality, not as a memorial celebration of what once happened and is hoped to recur in the mystical future Second Coming, but as a metonymic continuation or extension of the actual salvific act. This is what binds the community together through the generations and makes it an effective source of mutual support, charity and selfgovernance.

EKPHRASIS In a simple sense, ekphrasis is the figure in which a written text describes a real or imagined work of art, such as a painting or a statue. But in a more complex way, the figure refers to a way of knowing; it is an apparatus in which there are creative transfers and deepened insights between two or more media of expression and so a melding of kinds of mimesis, imitations of reality or fantasy.

The tendency in ekphrasis is for the visual, tactile and spatial reality of a work of art to be translated into a verbal illusion, for the illusion of the work of art to be created “in the mind’s eye” of the audience, and thus to be transformed into a different kind of experience — one, as Lessing pointed out, is created within the time-movement and abstracted allusionary framework of literature rather than the visual arts. The Penitentes image themselves forth in the pictures and forms they know through the painted bultos and carved santos, that is in the paintings and statues of sacred time, space, event, and personage, just as the artists — the folk-artists, as they are called, because of their limited material resources and their lack of professional training — imagine their created images in terms of the ceremonial performances they have grown up seeing and participating in. What might otherwise be considered a primitive drawing or a childlike doll becomes, through association with the disciplinary rites, an embodiment of sacred power — a power not independent of performers or liturgical hymns, but a mutual source drawn from creative recollections of the absent Mass and Eucharist. The community itself thus embodies and functions as the corpus christi. The result of this rhetorical “trick” is for the words of a spoken or written text to trigger responses in the mind of the listener or reader. The provocation and evocation is of collective memories of the community, stylized versions 233

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of coherence where actual recollection provides fragmentary and inconsistent scenarios and explanations. These triggered responses are translated by the mind of the participants into a mental image with some of the same affective results as a real or fictional work of art. This is done in order to simulate the feelings or meanings supposedly inherent in the recalled or generated illusion or iconicity of Catholic art. But with a proviso or rather two, as we shall explain soon: (1) the recollection of iconicity derives from the now lost world of preTridentine Spanish worship, with its roots in Iberian folk-traditions and the cultural mix which formed modern Spain; (2) the untypical population mix of the northern regions of New Spain is biased towards the New Christian feelings of nostalgia, converso regrets and guilt, and the mystical desires and longings of the Marranos. For the Penitentes, then, their memory images are of at least three kinds of prior experiences, if not of each individual then of the group as a collective with an historical continuity. First, there are bultos, santos and other objects of worship created, treasured, and passed on through families and the whole community which represent both the iconography of pre-Tridentine and Spanish-Christian worship practiced and believed in by the surrounding Latin American culture and, because locally produced for the most part by known artists in the local group, imbued with private associations to specific individuals and families. Second, the objects of devotion and meditation stand in the place of (a) more sophisticated and aesthetically crafted works of art from Old Mexico and Spain; (b) shifting artistic styles and theological understandings of the Church’s iconography in its move from late medieval and Gothic through Renaissance traditions to the Baroque and Rococo styles generated by the Counter-Reformation from the Council of Trent’s decrees, and (c) the teachings and practices of the Franciscan Friars who were charged with the spiritual and pastoral care of the region in the formative period of European settlement. (d) In addition, these objects also act as mnemonic images of previous performances of the Penitentes’ rituals in this community both as personally experienced and as recalled by older relatives and friends. Not least of all, there is (e) the peculiar function of the performances and accompanying sacred objects within the memory of Marranos who reinterpret the Christian icons in a midrashic way, to be explained below.

PHANTASIA The normal modern meaning of fantasy as an unreal, fantastic or delusionary image in the mind loses much of the rich dynamism to be found in the classical notion of phantasia, wherein there is a tension between skilfully produced perspectives 234

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that give the illusion of depth, distance and incorporation into movement and time and those images generated in the mind as memories, mnemonic signals and personifications or embodiments of abstract ideas.

To the more literal-minded and to the Protestant sensibilities that first began to write and speak about the Penitentes in the late nineteenth-century, as well as to the more rational and decorous priests sent from France and the northern states of America, the behavior and beliefs of the Penitentes seemed an outrageous throw-back to medieval Catholicism. Similar remarks can be found in England during the period of Henry VIII’s suppression of Roman Catholic institutions and the wave of Puritan iconoclastic raids on churches. The change in sensibility the Reformation signalled was not merely an intellectual shift of paradigms, but a deep-seated disruption in the mentality of society — the way they saw and felt reality, experienced religious phenomena, and expressed their faith. As we have indicated, for the founders of the Penitentes, even before the name was chosen for their small worship-groups, the move into the northern deserts of old Mexico meant virtually breaking all ties with the state and the church, isolating themselves from the reforms initiated by the Council of Trent and intensified by enlightened modes of supposed regularity and rationality, not to mention internalization of individual sacrality. Forming the brotherhoods with their pre-modern disciplinary rites may have been, for most of the Old Christians in the population, simply making a virtue of necessity, and perhaps unconsciously believing they were in accord with the priests and friars who had abandoned them after a long period of neglect. For the New Christians among them, however, the opportunity presented itself for developing their own rationale and interpretative gloss — a midrash — on these developments. To outsider, this brotherhood seemed to mark a savage and barbaric manifestation of the worst of unsophisticated folklore because of its indulgence of bloody rites of self-flagellation and auto-crucifixion. In that sense, the Penitentes belonged at once to the so-called “Black Legend” of Spanish colonization — a cruel feudal regime fueled by a fanatical and blood-thirsty Church — and to the racial bigotry associated with denigration of Hispanic culture, especially the supposedly lazy, ignorant and superstitious Mexicans inherited along with the territory of northern Mexico. But in a more generous perspective, the performance of ritual acts of penetentia, including flagellation and crucifixion, seem no more perverse than analogous ceremonies of Holy Week or Corpus Christi Day in Spain, Portugal, Italy or other Catholic nations. The folk imagination, as it were, conceives of the sacred events in visual, tactile, and psychological terms as part of a much wider concern for the spiritual and social bonding of the community, a community at once marginalized by neglect from central authorities of Church and State, before and after the United States gained dominion over the region, and at the 235

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same time driven to an intense secrecy necessitated by hostile and scornful groups of more recent settlers to this same part of the world. This secrecy moreover is a complex of traditional strategies acquired during the course of centuries and endowed already with its own mystical qualities.

LUDIBRIUM There are two main senses to this Latin term which in general means a kind of satirical or mocking play. It is adapted by Christian authors both as a way of pre-empting criticism of their bizarre rituals and a method of casting aspersions at the established religions, Jewish and pagan, which were in the process both of disappearing, it was hoped — and expected.

In the first sense, when used by some writers of the New Testament to describe the Passion of Christ, ludibrium describes the whole process of violent humiliation inflicted upon Jesus from the mock trials through the procession in the streets of Jerusalem to the Crucifixion itself. This already begins to indicate an awareness that the Passion was a Festival of Blood. In the second sense, which comes into focus after the Resurrection and glorification of the Christ, the whole episode mocks the vain and futile behavior of the Sadducees and the Romans who believe they have triumphed over the foolish band of messianists proclaiming their leader to be King of the Jews. It is now possible to understand how the scenes of the Passion and later re-enacted in a variety of sacramental, symbolic and iconic forms could be understood as a Festival of Blood. That is, there are vast gatherings of people brought together to see, participate in, and be transformed by a violent display of blood-letting. These groups are made up of Temple officials and their police agents, Roman rulers and their soldiers, mobs of people from within Jerusalem and hordes of pilgrims come from the countryside and further beyond the boundaries of the Land of Israel for the festival of Passover, and the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, both his intimate circle of disciples and other hangers-on with various degrees of faith and understanding. In Christain terms, too, the crowd also contains angels and demons who have come to observe and sometimes interfere with the proceedings of the festive drama. These rhetorical terms can help us gain a new perspective on the Penitentes, a way of seeing and appreciating their beliefs and practices without denigrating them or dismissing them as a minor folkloric phenomenon in the American southwest. They represent, not only a legitimate mode of Catholicism in their region that is understandable and appropriate in their time, but a very interesting variation — one can hardly call it a “relic” — of Christianity that seems to have been one of several modalities possible before the codification of the Roman Church in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Through 236

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both marginalization and isolation, these small communities of Mexican settlers in what would become part of the United States were forced by circumstances to create their own local religious organizations to carry out spiritual, liturgical and social functions either not available at all from official ecclesiastical or civil authorities or offered only in hostile, insulting terms. In a letter written to Friedrich Nicolai on 26 May 1769, Ephraim Lessing spoke of the difference between natural and arbitrary signs and of the poetic devices that play them off against one another. Plato and Aristotle, according to Murray Krieger, had grasped after these terms in order to argue the case for the primacy either of drama or epic as mimetic modes, Plato seeing imitation as a negative phenomenon thus condemning tragedy for being a doubled deception and Homer, when at least he speaks in his own voice, as less so, while Aristotle seeing imitation as a more positive phenomenon praised drama for creating speaking characters without the need, as Homer was forced to be, of a narrator to keep the verbal text moving through time and space. In the eighteenth century, during the Enlightenment, Lessing, with his north European bent towards Puritanism in regard to language, could distinguish between a natural-sign discourse containing words that referred to the real, material world of human activities and arbitrary-sign language containing symbolic, allegorical and hieroglyphic words whose reference points were in the moral, psychological or spiritual realms of discourse. If we pay careful attention to this extreme argument from the Protestant Aufklarung and set it against the matrix of Catholic Baroque sensibility in which the Penitentes operate, we may be able to pierce the fog of hostile mystification which has surrounded the performances of the brotherhood’s Holy Week rituals of selfflagellation and crucifixion. Thus it is no simple matter of accusing the brothers in the Penitentes who self-flagellate or have themselves nailed to a cross of transgressing the taboo against worship of idols by turning themselves into an image of Jesus Christ in a kind of perverse act of narcissism confounded with masochism. This may be sufficient to explain the behavior of so-called performance artists in America who slash or torture themselves in public in the search for aesthetic purification of themselves and society, although Perlmutter’s comment is somewhat limited, even when she claims to be following Georges Bataille and other post-modernist theoreticians.31 “The violent use of blood in art will always be seen as deviant in American society because self-mutilation cannot be culturally sanctioned in a society founded on Judeo-Christian values.”32 The statement is inadequate to describe the phenomenon of the Penitentes. 31 32

Perlmutter, “Blood Rituals” 6. Note that Perlmutter limits “American society” to a few urban centers based on Protestant founders and leaves out the whole Hispanic history of the continent and its culture.

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RELIGIONS OF THE FATHER AND OF THE SON God ordered: “You shall not take vengeance; you shall not hate your brother”; but to prepare oneself for degradation and shame is a criminal sin against ordinary love, for every man must love himself. [In doing this] he causes his fellow person to sin and to fail by giving him an opportunity to sin against him. Causing someone else to sin is a great sin . . . — Hasdai Crescas33

However, the point of our comparison of the Penitentes to these two other groups who practice self-mortification is to show that the Hispanic brotherhood cannot be defined by these rites in themselves, although, despite what may be said to “sanitize” the current practices of the Hermandad — and its reputation in secular and Protestant America — we need to “sensitize” ourselves to the way in which the festival of pain and blood marks the special inner-bonding of the community. Where the devotees of Thaipusam seek to reaffirm their faith in the gods of Hinduism through this sacrifice of their selves to Murugan and thus to pay back a debt of honour, as it were, given to them in the form of answered prayers for health and success, and whereas the practitioners of selfmortification in the Philippines manipulate the powers inherent in Catholic mystical beliefs concerning the imitation of Christ’s Passion for the sake of their own reputations and efficacy as shamanistic healers: the Penitentes celebrate the victory of Christ over death on the Cross as a confirmation of their communal service to and embodiment of the Christian community. But yet, in doing so, they also reveal themselves to be a distinct variation within the over-all Catholic world, a community created by its own historical circumstances and blending of peoples and beliefs. What is most remarkable about the Penitentes is, not merely the practice of self-flagellation and faux crucifixions, as indicated above, but that they center their faith on Jesus the Father, with a somewhat subordinate devotion to the Trinity composed of the God, Mary and Joseph, that is, the Holy Family. If these are not dismissed or castigated as ignorant theological errors or heretical outrages, then we need to find some way to explain the strange nature of their belief-system. I suggest that — and cannot yet produce an airtight case for — the significant presence of Sephardim (Jews of Iberian extraction) in the formative

33

Similarly her designation of “Judeo-Christian” has been narrowly and contentiously debased in the post-modernist sources she works from, so that it is no longer an inclusive, dynamic and profoundly rich tradition; she seems to equate it with a few caricatures of “Fundamentalist” preachers. Hasdai Cresacas, The Refutation of the Christian Principles, trans. Daniel J. Lasker (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992) p. 73.

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period of the brotherhood, that is, when the first Mexican colonists moved to the northern territories of New Spain to establish Nuova Galicia. Among them were a disproportionate number of New Christians, some of whom were already settled in Mexico for several generations but forced to seek greater safety at that time because of a sudden increase in persecution by the Inquisition during the so-called Grand Conspiracy, some of whom were new arrivals from Portugal through Spain or Spanish administered parts of the Italy, and a few even from France, Holland and Germany, that is both more tolerant Catholic and Protestant parts of Europe where New Christian refugees were able to return to functioning rabbinical communities. It is important to distinguish again carefully between the categories New Christians or conversos, meaning all those Jews who had converted or been forced to convert to Catholicism after 1390, and the other sub-groups of what we have called “Fuzzy Jews”, a metaphoric term deriving from mathematical theory to denote those clusters of people or even individual families who do not fit within clearly defined or stable sets; that “fuzzy” also leans towards a sense of uncertainty, vagueness and anxious insecurity is an advantage to the term but not its primary meaning. Thus it is misleading to equate CryptoJew and Marrano. Crypto-Jews are those individuals and families who have chosen to remain inside the domains of the Spanish or Portuguese crown and to be nominally subject to its ecclesiastical courts, particularly the national Inquisitions of each imperial state, but at the same time to live private, inner lives according to the what the Holy Office referred to as “the dead law of Moses,” i.e., Judaism. These are the real heretics whose habits and beliefs are contrary to Christian tenets. Marranos — a pejorative term used both by practicing Jews and by Christians — are individuals and groups who are neither faithful Catholics nor halachically-loyal Jews: and this uncertainty and vagueness may be either a matter of intellectual indecision, emotional fear, more or less ignorance of the family’s background or strategic and/or cynical or Machiavellian strategic choice. Marranism may also be a condition that is life-long or belong to isolated periods of a person’s life or a set of alternatives adopted in reaction to changing circumstances. In general, the fuzziness of Jews implies almost always what Marco Morselli calls in the Preface to a new Italian translation of Cecil Roth’s classic History of the Marranos “incertezza e ambiguità”, uncertainty and ambiguity.34 The presence of these fuzzy Jews among the founders of the Penitentes does not imply, though, that they deliberately set out to undermine the Catholic orthodoxy of the majority members nor that they were fully conscious of the influence they had on the communities which they were helping to establish and which they needed to protect them from the ecclesiastical and crown authorities to the south in Mexico City. Nor does it mean that the other Hispanic settlers 34

Marco Morselli, “Prefazione,” Cecil Roth, Storia dei marrani (Mariette 2003).

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were too uneducated or naïve to recognize the heretical nature of the beliefs and practices that were coming into shape through this fusion of religious cultures. Instead, we argue that just as the New Christians tended towards ways of worshipping that seemed most natural and rational to them because of their increasingly fading memories of the ancestral religion, so too did the other members of the formative brotherhood create a version of Catholicism that seemed best suited to their isolation, alienation and distance from the main centres of Church influence. Iakov Levi, an Israeli psychoanalyst, sees as an essential difference between monotheistic religions, their depiction and re-enactment of father-son relations, and most particularly the mythical event in Freudian theory of the rebellion by the primal horde of brothers against the seemingly invincible father who dominates their lives and restricts their access to women for sexual purposes. Once these brothers conspire together to kill the father, to devour his body in a cannibal feast, and to take over the first community by sharing the women, they are not only consumed by guilt and fear — guilt for the crime of parricide and fear of the father’s return to seek vengeance either in a new disembodied divine form or in the person of one of their own — but they seek to ritually undue their original sin by a variety of means, from conceiving of the father as resurrected in some form or other of totem animal, denying their actions by projecting them on to third parties (scapegoats) or by pretending that the father is still alive in one of them in a less cruel and selfish person. Thus, in some religions, such as rabbinical Judaism, the primal father is elevated to cosmic proportions, denied any tangible qualities, and given the embodiment in a Law that does not accept any challenges from the original band of brothers but requires that they — and their descendants — dutifully serve the hypostasized Father with all their hearts and minds. In other religions, such as medieval European Christianity, the Son is elevated to a status of equality with the Father or is worshipped in place of the Father, albeit nominally existing in a virtually inaccessible place and form. Confronted with one another, those who worship the Son (Christians) imagine a constant threat from those who worship the Father and deny the Son (Jews), while those who deny the reality of the Son (Jews) cannot comprehend the actions or beliefs of the others who can (Christians). During the Middle Ages, Roman Catholicism tended to mitigate some of the harshest aspects of the dominant Son-religion by establishing a powerful mediating role for the figure of Jesus’ earthly mother Mary and by tending towards reducing the power of Christ into the image of an infantilized Jesus held in his mother’s arms and feeding at her breast. In the next age, when Protestantism began to exalt the figure of the Father into the active dominant role and eradicating the divine powers of the Mother, there was a heterodox tendency either to meld the Father into the Son or to recreate the person of the Holy Ghost as the dominant figure of the Trinity. 240

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These developments at the margins created a sense of anti-sacramentalism with a concomitant empowerment of the human component of the Mother Church as the saintly family or primary horde standing against the satanic powers supposedly invested in the distorted or false faith of Catholicism.35 Several other kinds of response emerged in the Roman Church in the so-called Counter-Reformation and in the margins where small groups were outside of the theological monitoring of the Mother Church, Ecclesia. In one way, the Roman Church came to depend on a sequence of extra- or non-testamental visionary experiences, particularly by lay and religious women and children; this visions validated new directions in the worship of Mary, in the affective meditations on the instruments of the crucifixion which thereby gave new meaning to the human sufferings of Christ, and in the concern of the church for the education of children, women and laymen in general. In another way, the new visionary experiences stressed private spiritual exercises and meditational techniques to supplement the traditional liturgical practices and the newer cults devoted to the suffering body of Christ, to Mary and to the Holy Family. In fringe areas, defined by the contested and shifting boundaries of Roman Catholic and Protestant control, as well as by the distances from European ecclesiastical and military domination, small groups re-created traditional rituals and beliefs in the light of their special needs and of their mixed populations. Though there may be some evidence of interference from non-Christian indigenous populations or residual practices from archaic levels of Catholic (or even pre-Catholic) worship, for the most part we can see a vital creative energy at work adapting the new styles and content of Tridentine religion to the particular conditions of isolation, neglect and hardship in which these communities were constituting themselves. In other words, in those isolated communities in which moradas developed to take the place of the friars and priests who either were not there in sufficient numbers or who were forced out by the shifting political boundaries that history imposed, the Penitentes created their own version of a Counter-Reformation and baroque-inspired religion. It is the product of bricolage, that is, the construction of new forms out of the material left behind by the retreating Franciscans and Mexican officials, and the development of these ideas, images and practices by local artists, thinkers and community leaders who believed themselves to be acting in good faith and in accord with that they remembered or could find out about the Church through fragmented lines of communication with the metropolitan centers to the south. 35

See for primary documents in translation “The Council of Trent” online at http://www. fore-runner.com/chalcedon/X0020_15._Council_of_Trent; and “The Council of Trent: Session XII” online at http://www.amerciancatholictrithsociety.com/docs/TRENT/ trent22.

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Note that here for a moment we are dealing with very large generalizations rather than attempting to pinpoint precise historical actions and actors. It is not our claim that in all periods all Christians — Eastern Orthodox, Nestorians, Copts, let alone all varieties of Protestants — fit the paradigms set out above. Yet there comes a time, when preparing to focus in on some very specific examples, when this kind of very broad overview is called for, to set the parameters of the ensuring discussion. In fact, the kind of discussion that follows looks at very small, often localized groups who tend to have limited influence — and to be influenced in rather peculiar ways by the major currents of their time because of the group’s isolation, alienation and distance from those larger movements in theology, art history and politics. To a certain degree, furthermore, the number of individuals involved — whether as single persons or small brotherhoods — is too low to fit with statistical norms usually referred to when mapping out trends, fashions and schools of thought. The ways in which influence is felt is “peculiar” also in the sense that it depends on specific individuals and their families, friends, and neighbors. One artist, one traveler returned from a trip to a far-away market or pilgrim site, and one performer with unique talents can not only stand out from among his fellows for several years, allowing his manner of interpreting the festival of pain to shape the way others see and experience their own performances, but that single person can dominate decisions taken by the group for long periods after his retirement from participation or his death.

THE ARGUMENT THUS FAR Es desleido el que dice “no lei en la Ley santa,” ni sabe cuantos son cinco el que sus libros mo alcanza. It is an ill-read man who says: I have not read the holy Law”; nor does he know how many books make five who does not grasp her books. — Miguel de Barrios/Daniel Levi36

Thus far the argument has been fairly simple, almost perfectly logical: (1) Many New Christians settled throughout the Spanish Empire in the first generations 36

Miguel de Barrios/Daniel Levi, “Alabanza jocosa a la Ley santisima en la fabrica de la sinagoga/In Lighthearted Praise of the Holy Law in the foundation of the Synagogue”in Oelman, Marrano Poets of the Seventeenth Century, pp. 232–233.

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after the Conquest, including the regions which now form the southwestern states of America. (2) In fringe areas, such as those northern parts of Mexico that have become Arizona, New Mexico and southern Colorado, former Jews — sometimes Crypto-Jews and sometimes Marranos — sought to escape from both the Inquisition and its associated social and civil prejudices in the main centres of the empire and also from more or less organized communities of secret Jews. (3) However, simply by travelling so far away from the normal places where conversos would want to live, where they could do business and keep in touch with the outside world, these descendants of Sephardim seemed to want to assimilate into and help shape the kind of new groups of Spanish settlers who were themselves suspicious of ecclesiastical authority and colonial administrations. (4) Since these distant and uneconomically-sound Hispanic settlements identified themselves with their own penitential brotherhoods for spiritual, social and economic solidarity, the New Christians also joined these fraternal organizations. (5) Ergo: It is consequently no surprise to find men and women who today step forward to claim their ancestral heritage within the line of the conversos, and self-proclaim themselves children of anousim, speak of their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers as hermanos in the Penitentes. But have we proved anything about continuity of beliefs or practices? No amount of genealogical detail or DNA testing can do more than say that these contemporary, self-identifying Crypto-Jews and Marranos received anything more than vague, fragmented and probably very inaccurate notions of what it meant to be a Jew, certainly not enough to satisfy a rabbinical court asked to allow them back into the Jewish fold as sinners rather than as Christians seeking to convert. Something else is required to prove that there was a continuity, no matter how oblique and grotesque, in their beliefs and in their performance of the fundamental mitzvoth which indicate Jewishness as other than a mere biological residue. While there may be domestic traditions about lighting candles, strangling chickens, or putting on clean clothes for Friday evening that may have convinced suspicious neighbours and then inquisitors of the judaizing tendency in a particular family, if the people concerned really have no idea of why they do these things or what they may have meant — or have now no meaning at all except to preserve a respect for grandparents — then this cannot really prove the continuity of Judaism itself. Continuance of this kind of Jewishness would appear in the following kinds of evidence: 1. Deliberate performance and recitation of Jewish prayers, rituals, and customs in private, despite pro forma displays of public adherence to Roman Catholicism. In other words, the classic type of the double-life associated with Crypto-Judaism. 2. With the breakdown of intellectual continuities and the absence of proper texts and interpretations, the deliberate performance of counter-Christian acts and words, such as omitting key words in church singing, washing 243

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3.

4.

away baptismal water from a child in a domestic ceremony following the ecclesiastical rite, burying a crucifix or sacred image under the entrance stone of a house to step on it when coming home. Substitutions and displacements of Jewish rites and customs performed with the understanding that these new acts and words are symbolically equivalent to the forbidden and forgotten mitzvoth, such as hanging a cross on the doorpost of the house to be kissed when passing through as though it were a mezuzah, fasting instead of feasting on Passover so as to avoid eating leavened bread, displaying pork sausages in the window to signal that the family within is Christian but with the sarcastic intent of mocking the forbidden meat. The invention, not quite out of whole cloth, of explanations and interpretations for otherwise inexplicable customs and speech peculiarities that mark a group of people as Judaizers to the suspicious outsider, when these new commentaries assert a religious difference from the Christian society and identify this difference, no matter how erroneously, as Jewish.

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SE C T IO N 2

A SURVEY OF FUZZY JEWS IN COLONIAL AMERICA

. . . while philosophers of history . . . have refuted the Hegelian-Toynbeian fossilized conception of Judaism by demonstrating how Jewish mystic-messianism periodically revived and motivated Jews to construct their future, the psychological problem of how Jews have treated their failing past has been largely ignored . . . Recent studies . . . have shown that Western schizophrenics suffer from a ruptured linear time conception reflected in their inability to relate their present to past and future. — Mordechai Rotenberg37

To come to appreciate the extensive and pervasive presence of these kinds of claims to be part of a line of anousim in the middle of New Christian culture, we need to run through the history of Jewish settlement in the overseas Spanish and Portuguese Empires prior to the nineteenth century. It can then be seen that the situation of the Marranos on the Moradas is a variation on other kinds of clandestine and occluded Judaisms in Latin America. At that point we can discuss again more sensitively the unique factors in our main topic. We can also tease apart the philosophical and theological implications of what is seen in the data and what is claimed by the people. Norman Fiering and Paolo Bernardini’s: introductory essay to an important and often-referred-to anthology of scholarly essays, speaks of “A Milder Colonization: Jewish Expansion to the New World, and the New World in the Jewish Consciousness of the Early Modern Era.”38 What seems to be at stake is “the Jewish spirit of inquiry and ‘skepticism’” in Renaissance thinking and how this leads to a reassessment of the New Christian role in Renaissance and Modernity. There is, however, also a hint that such a cliché borrowed from Felipe FernándezArmesto does not adequately explain Jewish identity nor influence on Christian society. If, as author says, “Marrano identity . . . becomes a sort of schizophrenia,” then “[t]he social and intimate conflicts that shaped marrano identity and conscience in the Old World were reproduced, with subtle differences, in the New World . . . ” (p. 7). Not so much Jewish intelligence, wit and scepticism are involved in shaping the new geographical and psychological worlds, but rather “schizophrenia”, or rather, to move away from a sloppy, superficial term, emotional 37

38

Mordechai Rotenberg, “The ‘Midrash’ and Biographic Rehabilitation” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 25:1 (1986) 44; available online at /http://www.jstor.org/ stable/1386062 (Read 16 June 2008). Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800. (New York and Oxford: Bergham Books, 2001).

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confusions, anxieties, and fears, with their defence mechanisms and projective ideologies. When the underpinnings of the Christian-Latin synthesis, embedded in feudal and ecclesiastical institutions, starts to come unstuck for all sorts of reasons from the fifteenth century onwards, people do not rise up in brilliant Renaissance garb to celebrate their new freedoms and potentialities; they are afraid, humiliated, uncertain, angry, grief-stricken, and eager to cast blame and hurt others so as not to feel the deep pains inside themselves. Bernardini, for instance, speaks of how a “coalition of Jesuits and French planters” worked together, with “a mix of social envy and religious hatred” to expel the Jews from France’s Caribbean colonies (p. 12). Unfortunately, what is not discussed is what the Jews felt inside their individual and group selves in response to this envy and hatred. They did not just move on to safer homes and more secure economic opportunities. If the adults could rationalize the actions of their enemies, what did it seem to be for the Jewish boys and girls to see their parents humiliated, the authority of the rabbinical community crushed, and the familiar setting of their childhoods lost forever? They could not forgive and forget, and their childhood experiences would shape their future adult attitudes and behaviours. That means that “A Milder Colonization” has to be seen in terms of much harsher events in the lives of Jews and New Christians moving from one place to another and unable to provide the emotional or physical security that young children crave. Paradoxically, Jews were exiled to the New World and sought refuge there and, once there, the rules changed and they were forbidden entry. The secret Jews (in the sense of illegally settled) were there in disproportionately large numbers from the very beginning of colonization but only under the disguise of an assumed Catholicism. They suffered as outsiders and always-suspected heretics but they often took on the tasks of highrisk low-profit enterprises and thus were implicated in the early establishment of slavery and the slave-trade. For five hundred years, they preserved their specific personalities and communal identities against formidable odds, overt and covert, but changed their deepest attitudes, lost touch with their fundamental values, and became, sometimes at least, horrible parodies of their worst enemies. James Romm begins a survey of how the Americas were conceived and perceived through the filter of ancient Jewish history in “Biblical History and the Americas: The Legend of Solomon’s Ophir, 1492–1591,” reminding us to avoid projecting back our own knowledge and presuppositions on to the age of discovery. The same point is made, but with a slightly different focus, by Noah J. Efron in “Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands among Jewish Communities of Europe (From 1492 to the Thirty Years War)”. Key to this perspective is the fact “that shifting world boundaries mattered to Jews first and foremost, for what they might imply about the shifting social and intellectual boundaries between Jews and Christians in Europe.”39 Patricia Seed, in a related study in 39

In Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 49.

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that same anthology, deals with “Jewish Scientists and the Origin of Modern Navigation” and stresses the self-conscious adult activities of Jewish intellectuals, with their penchant for meticulous calculations and kabbalistic fascination with numbers a contributing factor in their domination of cartography and aspects of astrology. Thanks, too, to their familiarity with Islamic and hence Greek traditions, yet driven by a Jewish need to circumvent the kind of training and experience closed to them as non-Christians, they also created instruments which made the advances in the Age of Discovery more accessible to the middle classes and the informally educated. A more particular focus appears in the next essay by Benjamin Schmidt, “The Hope of the Netherlands: Menasseh ben Israel and the Dutch Idea of America.” Matched with the Dutch ideals of a freer and safer world for trade after ridding themselves of Spanish domination, the Jewish ideology expressed in Menasseh ben Israel provides a vision of “the New World . . . as a site of salvation . . . a place of promise, potential, and, most importantly, strategic support.”40 David S. Katz in a similar way examines “Israel in America: The Wanderings of the Lost Ten Tribes from Mikveih Yisrael to Timothy McVeigh.” The usurpation and distortion of Jewish ideas and ideals of the New World in the writings of Christian fanatics have continued down to the present day in strange cults and sects, indicating how dangerous certain discourses can be when detached from their original ethical sources.

CONCEALING, PRESERVING AND RESHAPING The girl brought me into the house of love. She was as pure and perfect as Abigail. When she took off her veil she revealed a form That put to shame the beauty of Esther. Her light shone in the darkness, made everything tremble. The hills started to dance like rams. I thought: “Now our secrets are discovered.” But she stretched out her hand like a woman of strength And enveloped me with her jet-black hair. So the day was immediately turned into night. — Judah Al-Harizi41

The second section of the same anthology we have been running through above is called “Identity at Stake: Concealing, Preserving, and Reshaping 40 41

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 91. Judah Al-Harrizi, “A Secret Kept,” translated by David Goldstein, ed., The Jewish Poets of Spain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983; orig. 1971) p. 169.

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Judaism among the Conversos and Marrranos of Spanish America.” This section opens with Robert Rowlands’ essay “New Christian, Marrano, Jew” and his lament that, aside from Inquisition records, “[i]ndependent evidence on the survival of Judaism in the Iberian Peninsular is for the most part simply not available”.42 Distinguishing between the three terms in his title, Rowlands points out that “the fact that an individual was entirely or partly of Jewish descent does not by itself mean that he considered himself, or was considered by others, to be a Jew.”43 But whether a person believed him or herself to be Jewish in a religious sense, whether or not he or she did anything in private about it, so far as the Church and most of Iberian society was concerned, “all Iberian New Christians were Judeo-Catholics.” Consequently, anyone with a known background in Judaism had to live a life of concealment and duplicity, with all the anxiety that such an activity entailed. Putting aside otherwise important distinctions between Spanish and Portuguese New Christians, the constant hounding by the Inquisition and the perpetual need to prove oneself of clean enough blood for public and ecclesiastical positions was enough to make all individuals and even families involved more or less neurotic. This was true, not just for people who converted or who were the children of conversos, but for those generations further down the track when the memory of and the biological connections to Jewishness were thinned out into a quarter, an eighth or a sixteenth part of oneself. Rowland argues that within four generations Old Christians were marrying Old Christians, and any New Christian blood was covered over by ignorance or denial — and denial could be formalized into the purchase of certificates of purity of blood. Nevertheless, three factors have to be taken into account beyond this rather strict and positivistic assessment of the situation: (1) careful scrutiny by other scholars shows that, rather than this “thinning out” of the blood lines to the point of disappearance, many families closed ranks and intermarried to the point of near incestuous connections; (2) despite halachic regulations and popular misconceptions, Jewishness continues not only by genealogical connections through the maternal line but through shared memories, family and individual commitment, and personal preference by persons who feel an intense spiritual or intellectual attraction to Judaism and/or the role of underdog; (3) and then, granted that these two arguments may not be amenable to statistical or archival proofs, there was always a chance that some jealous business partner or spiteful neighbour — or silly child — could bring the

42 43

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 125. Ibid, p. 126.

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taint of Jewish ancestry to the attention of the authorities and begin a long and costly process for the families involved. Restricting himself to the written record, Rowland does not venture into speculations on the consequences of this nagging anxiety in terms of domestic relations between husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings. Yet once any single individual was brought before the Holy Office, it did not take long before he or she was forced to denounce other family members. Torture and its threat broke the will of all but the most saintly, stubborn or fanatical. Knowing this as a likely outcome should any individuals be denounced, potential suspects prepared in advance, as we pointed out before; (a) they coordinated stories to be told to the inquisitors, (b) wrote out lists for memorization of names of dead, escaped or unlikely people whose arrest would probably lead to quick release or eventual reconciliation through confessions of minor pecadillos, and (c) thought through who were the enemies, rivals and obsessively pious neighbours or colleagues who could be mentioned as their denunciators and had convincing reasons for the charges based on misunderstandings, old grudges, and other non-religious motives The closest Rowland seems to come to confronting this issue, however, is in the following lines: It was inevitable, under these circumstances, that the Jewish cultural and religious identity preserved by a very significant proportion of the first New Christian generation — as Samuel Usque put it, they did not “change the secret of their souls” — should have become progressively more diluted as parents neglected, by choice or by fear, to pass on the Jewish cultural and religious traditions to their children.44

But though “fear” is mentioned, the dynamics and strategies of this “neglect” are not explored, and the effect on the interpersonal relationships in the household are passed over. How can fear and distrust become the dominant features of childrearing without distorting the whole personality structure of the children who grow up in such households? Thus again, the word child appears, but the implications are left hanging: It is likely that, as among the Xuetas of Majorca, marriage alliances were consciously and selectively used to preserve a hard crypto-Judaic core: some children would be married within the group, and would be given religious instruction; others would be allowed to marry outside the group to non-Judaizing Christian families or to Old Christians, and from these such dangerous instructions would be withheld.45 44 45

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 142. Ibid, p. 143.

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What kind of family life is this, where some children are told who they really are and others are not, where some can be trusted and others are constantly under suspicion? But what about the emotional and psychological issues? If we are saying that Marranos are by definition crazy because of the circumstances they live in — and partly choose to live in — that is also to say that they are crazy in a different sort of a way than a society that holds itself together as a Christian entity through its hysterical concerns for purity of blood and its endless testing of the faith of the other in its very midst. In a certain kind of family therapy, psychiatrists note that the group designates one of its members to be insane on their behalf, so they all don’t fall apart into dysfunctional behaviours and delusions; yet it is the group that is crazy, and not just its designated scapegoat. So too for Iberian civilization.

WACHTEL’S SENSITIVE STUDY OF SOUVENIRS Behind the repudiation of ceremonial by reformers lay a radically different conception of the world, a world in which text was everything, sign nothing. The sacramental universe of late medieval Catholicism was, from such a perspective, totally opaque, bewildering and meaningless world of dumb objects and vapid gestures, hindering communication. — Eamon Duffy46

If everything seemed crazy or at least uncanny (unheimlich, in Freud’s terms) in Iberia, how much more so in the rest of Europe and the New World where the ever-suspicious and increasingly disbelieving gaze of the reformers, the Protestants, and the slowly emerging secularists and materialists observed the old actions in the churches and on the streets, looked at the banners and the processions, and heard the archaic liturgies and songs. And if that was hard and troubling to pious Christians themselves, what about to converted Jews who, though nominally part of the dominant faith and trying either to believe or to seem to believe, still thought and felt and believed in their own very different and ancient ways? Nathan Wachtel updates his research in “Marrano Religiosity in Hispanic America in the Seventeenth Century,” making clear that the task is to avoid reductive schemas “and instead restore to marrano [sic] religiosity its full 46

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992) p. 532.

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measure of complexity and diversity.”47. Wachtel speaks of religiosity and not religion since there is no theological doctrine at play: “but rather a set of concerns, practices, and beliefs grouped together in a configuration made up of various, even contradictory, elements whose diversity does not preclude a kind of unity — a generic style that makes it possible for us to identify and label it with a specific term, in this case ‘marrano.’”48 Hence Marranism is different — although not always very different from — Crypto-Judaism, since in this last case there is an attempt to reproduce and develop a kind of doctrinal aspect of Judaism secretly under the cover of New Christian beliefs and practices in public. In this way, we move from a general term Sephardic for all sorts of Judaism originating in the Iberian culture zone to New Christian or converso for those who were either forcibly or voluntarily converted to Catholicism, and then to a gamut of types of persons who could not make the self-transformation from Jewish to Christian smoothly, with Crypto-Jews designating those with a conscious effort to maintain their Jewishness through a number of Marrano types who with more or less awareness maintained some Judaizing tendencies and then those who rejected and denied this Jewish background as much as possible but were nevertheless held under suspicion by church and state authorities. Wachtel goes right to the key problem of childrearing and family relations. His discussion requires our sustained attention, both for what it says and for what is left in silence. “By definition,” he writes, “the conversos had received some Christian education that had inevitably left traces, even to the point of stamping their personalities with indelible mental reflexes.”49 But what exactly does he mean by “traces” and “reflexes”? He seems to focus on conscious and linguistic elements, rather than exploring the psychiatric dimensions — the questions at the heart of modern studies in brain anatomy, genetic expression in response to environmental conditions, and, associated with these factors, rapid changes in genetic make-up. For what he is talking about is traumatic impacts on the child, from the foetus in the womb through the infant in its mother’s arms through the toddler absorbing cultural signals through the speech-acts and domestic rituals of the family and then the way young children and adolescents are integrated into the community as they achieve affective and cognitive independence. These “traces” and “reflexes” are thus more than linguistic tics and behavioral quirks; they are actual neuronal connections and hormonal triggers in the brain that are modifiable by physiological and psychological experiences. 47 48 49

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 149. Ibid, p. 150. Ibid.

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As Wachtel points out, for instance, “the experience of fasting” — one of the easiest customs to continue because, unlike feasts which are collective, loud and highly visible occasions, the fast can be solitary, silent, and inconspicuous — “could include a certain sensual, exaltation. Indeed,” he goes on, ‘fasting together was considered as a mark of trust or affection, the secret was shared with the family, friends, or even more significantly, with lovers.”50 Fasting, known as cro and suchil, could become the very term for “love-making,” and hence take on new significations virtually never dreamt of before in Judaism, and yet thus become a potent new ritual for mystical, as well as social and psychological, elaboration. In another instance, the ceremonies surrounding childbirth among Marranos could appear as a blending of traditional Jewish custom and an imitation or parody — depending on the degree of self-consciousness among the individuals — of the Adoration of Mary and Baby Jesus. The importance of the infant coming into the world as the hope for the future and the centre of the family’s worship of its own secret desire to celebrate the secret identity could easily take the form of iconography associated with Catholic piety because that imagery was saturated with sacred feelings that could flow from one occasion to another, and was under the direction of the women of the household rather than the men since no overt Jewish rites or prayers were known appropriate to the occasion except that which came at once as the iconic language of worship itself inside the Church and, more ambiguously and subversively, through the awareness that the Holy Family of Joseph, Mary and the Infant Saviour were fundamentally pre-Christian, that is, Jewish.

ZEUGMA AND THE MARRANO COMPLEX “Alusión y elusion” [allusion and elusiveness] is Dámaso Alonso’s fortunate expression for Góngora’s style, but it also applies to Golden Age rhetoric in general with its fondness for zeugma, roughly describable as a grammatical short circuit based on the ambivalence of an antecedent. — Stephen Gilman51

The next essay in the anthology we have been following, Chapter 8, by Solange Alberro is called “Crypto-Jews and the Mexican Holy Office in the Seventeenth50 51

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 160. Stephen Gilman, The Novel According to Cervantes (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), p. 169.

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Century.” She begins by reviewing the creation of the New Christian Problem in Spain and its transference to the New World, where full acceptance of the conversos, no matter how sincere their faith in Catholicism, was not possible. “This assimilation would never be complete, since for generations thereafter the stigma, the suspicions, and the restrictions on holding office or receiving distinctions would weigh on converso descendants.”52 If you ask how anyone could stand so much sustained harassment and persecution, it can be answered, at least partly, by seeing that these were individuals and families for the most part, like American Jews today, who thought of themselves as more assimilated and loyal to the host society, of which they assumed they were an integral part, and could not imagine themselves living elsewhere, with a new language, a new culture, and a new set of unfamiliar threats. As Alberro puts it, “These Jews were . . . in their natural and traditional medium where they were more likely to recognize the threats, delude the authorities, and even beat the dangers they had learned to evade since at least the fourteenth century.”53 In the new colonies they tried to believe they had an added advantage, that of being more difficult to recognize or even be seen, given the immensity of the New World and the relative disorganization and poor resources of state and church, and even of the Inquisition. Often enough to give some encouragement and comfort to the Marrano settlers in Mexico or Peru, the people among whom they now lived were either uneducated about the telltale signs of judaizing or indifferent to the point of hostility to the government and ecclesiastical agents who came to track down the enemy within. To a certain degree, the Crypto-Jews were right. But not completely. Any community will develop animosities and jealousies, and turning in a neighbour as a judaizer was a perfect way to get even or get rid of enemies, rivals, and “outsiders”. Alberro shows that there were also differences in class and gender, with “[w]omen in general — and the poor in particular”54 more likely to be incautious or unaware of the suspicions their behaviour created, where the men seemed to be more savvy in the ways of duplicity because they were honed to an alertness by their commercial and civil activities outside the home. In charge of the cooking, cleaning and governance of the servants and slaves in the home, women did develop some means of protecting themselves from prying eyes and suspicious ears. Thus Aberro points out how “Jewish women shielded themselves behind practical explanations [of their probable judaizing customs] to allay suspicions . . . ”55 To say this, as Aberro does, 52 53 54 55

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 173. Ibid, p. 174. Ibid, p. 177. Ibid.

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however, is to risk what that most perceptive of scholars Michael P. Carroll calls Orientalizing the topic. It also demeans the people concerned, according to a formula tricked out from Edward Said’s book of the same name. As we have already started to show, the fatuous and slick slide from recognizing that Europeans were indeed curious and fascinated by the cultures of the East to a claim that the linguists, historians, novelists and painters who sought to understand and imagine the significance of these other peoples, customs, and civilizations were stupid, crass, mean-spirited colonialists and racists is unsustainable in any large and fair account of what the collective enterprise of Western civilization and its scholarship was all about.56 What therefore Carroll tries to do is to say that if any one (such as Wachtel) points out how secret Jewishness was passed on and creatively constructed more by women than by men among the Crypto-Jews or Marranos then, ipso facto, the scholar must be a trivializing, infantalizing, sexist and racist stooge of European imperial powers. Another point made by these post-modernist historians is that any attempt to see the Inquisition as analogous to the Holocaust must be wrong: not because these perceptive academics are denying that the Shoah took place (God forbid!) but because they would rather take a more sceptical and generous view of the Holy Office. After pointing out that all juridical investigations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were conducted with what modern folk would call torture and that in the long run not so many victims were actually burned at the stake, they conclude that the Holocaust should not be referred to.57 But being aware of the Shoah and its enormity, on the one hand, provides a sensitization to researchers so that they are diverted by crass positivism with its failure to take seriously the real impact of persecutions over many generations; and, on the other, by taking cognizance of the long-term effects of the inquisitorial ordeal, we can approach the continuing trauma of the Holocaust on the coming generations.58 The distortion and slur is turned against students of the Penitentes who have tried to see various customs, cult objects and imagery and thematics in hymns sung on the moarada or in Holy Week processions as evidence of a Judaic heritage because, says Carroll and his ilk, such an interpretation 56

57

58

Michael P. Carroll, “The Debate over Crypto-Jewish Presence in New Mexico: The Role of Ethnographic Allegory and Orientalism” Sociology of Religion (2002). They probably say “referenced”, since all subtle distinctions between references, allusions, hints, implications and so on are effaced by the jargon. I would add now the re-emergence of anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism in the lead-up to and in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States by Islamicist terror organizations. Both in terms of wave after wave of pernicious slanders and physical abuse and of increased dhimmi behavior and denunciation by both self-hating Jews and Israelis, it is more possible to give credence to the pervasiveness of this kind of madness amongst the Sephardim.

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necessarily removes the individuals and groups involved from the dynamics of history — a non-narrative and hence a directionless movement — and places them in the westernised orientalist story of subjugation and powerlessness. The truth — yes, there is a truth, a verifiable, although difficult and complex truth of a history that progresses from stage to stage, as this book attempts to argue — cannot be ruled out of order because it is politically incorrect as per some post-modernist ideology of self-hatred and categorical assertion of multiculturalism (in the sense of non-judgmentalist equivalence between all peoples and all their historical narratives, except that some, as in Animal Farm, are more equal than others). Wachtel extrapolates from close-readings of the texts (the few that exist), and out of these analyses — whether post-modern critics wish to agree with him or not — a very different picture emerges than that postulated from the pseudoscepticism of Orientalist ideology. Men could resort to more cynical ploys by, for instance, paying someone else to fast on their behalf, but men and women, aware of the dangers, could and did use the more usual trick of performing an unexceptional Christian rite and rationalizing it by giving it a Jewish intention. The family might choose “to sacrifice” one of their children by sending him or her to a monastery or convent, thereby enhancing the strength of their cover identity. However, it is clear now that such a “sacrifice” could take many colours: (a) there was the opportunity to send out of the household a child whose tendencies towards a Christian religious life would be assuaged at the same time as it removed a constant threat to the safety of the family; (b) there was also the chance to remove from the family circle a boy or girl with uncontrollable rage or talkativeness who could expose the family unintentionally; and (c) there was the bonus of placing a clever and self-disciplined child in a place where he or she could both vouch for the bona fides of the family’s sincerity as Christians and at the same time serve as a spy on what plots were afoot against the household of Marranos. To enrol a child in a religious institution meant providing proof of purity of blood as Old Christians, and since the documents could be bought and/ or bribed, the placement of a son or daughter gave the family an opportunity to obtain a certificate that could allay further suspicions on the part of the Inquisition. The questions of their sincerity as Christians and commitment to a secret Judaism may not be central. Thus, whatever their private beliefs, they were always suspect because of their Jewish backgrounds, whether one or five or more generations back. The history of Marranism, as I. S. Révah has shown 255

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along with Carsten L. Wilke, is more a matter of families than of individuals. It involves intergenerational clusters of relatives and close associates. That means there is more of a problem of finding out how small groups of people protect themselves and their heirs from official harassment — persecutions which could lead to confiscation of wealth and property, deprivation of offices and titles, and carry on to lengthy periods of incarceration, banishment, or burning at the stake. Tracking down these emotional responses is more important than finding out what one or another individual happened to believe at any given moment. The questions we must ask ourselves — and of the documents we interrogate — should be concerned with behaviour and strategic disposition of women and children, as well as adult males, and allow some consideration for individuals’ and families’ changing allegiances, loyalties and beliefs as they moved around and sought for commercial success or influence under various rulers. Families who maintained a fairly coherent Judaism generation after generation are very rare. We more often have to do with what Alberro calls “cultural mestizos, rejected by both religions, each equally driven by purity and orthodoxy.”59 From time to time, some individual might stand out by commitment to the ancestral faith and an active attempt to cross into more tolerant nations and return to rabbinical Judaism. Thus when we talk about the family history of Marranism, we are speaking of a fairly amorphous phenomenon, but one in which many customs and personality traits are kept. Though not necessarily Christian or Jewish in a strictly religious sense, these family customs provide the matrix of development that can be expressed when certain other triggering devices come into play, such as arrest by the Inquisition or a visit to a city outside of Spain or Portugal where rabbinical institutions are legal and operative. This matrix turns out to be similar to the rising secularism, scepticism, and pluralism that characterizes the emergent modernism in Western Europe, especially in Protestant lands, but is also marked by tendencies more specifically Jewish than Christian, such as a witty and playful sense of iconoclasm, a somewhat cynical attitude towards all authority in general, and a willingness to leave behind traditional modes of business and social life that derived from the very feudal and ecclesiastical institutions Jews were always excluded from. This was a mentality comfortable — if such is the correct word — with ambiguity, insecurity and a kind of culture of nomadism. A further essay in the anthology, Chapter 9 by Eva Alexandra Uchmany deals with “The Participation of New Christians and Crypto-Jews in the Conquest, Colonization, and Trade of Spanish America, 1521–1660”. A decade after the expulsion from Spain, “In 1501 the Catholic king excluded from the 59

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 183.

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West Indies adventure all the converted Jews and New Christians who had been punished for Judaizing during the past ten years.”60 But not only had those suspicious people been travelling and trading in the New World during that tenyear period, but even afterwards, despite the attempts by the Crown to enforce the exclusion, many conversos and Crypto-Jews made their way to the Americas by all sorts of tricks and ruses. Not too long afterwards, as well, “the Catholic king secularized the sanctions of the 1501 decree and offered to rehabilitate lost civil rights for a large sum of money. Indeed, the king sold to the enabled (inhàbiles) papers that restored their lost honors.”61 Contradictions like these marked the entire treatment of New Christians both in Spanish Europe and Spanish America. Unless we take into account the unsettling characteristics of the real history of the phenomena we are dealing with, its proclivity to distress the victims of the Inquisition by the erratic nature of the persecutions, the lengthy periods of uncertainty, the sudden eruptions of denunciation, and the inevitability of someone close to the family or part of its innermost core of love and mutual care breaking down with or without some external provocation — unless we keep constantly aware of these tortuous circumstances we can never fully appreciate what kept driving individuals and families to keep their secrets, to go further into hiding, whether through geographical withdrawals into the fringes and margins of empire or through metaphorical caverns and abysses of disguise, self-delusion, and denial. Rather than approaching the subject with disrespect and suspicion of the contemporary survivors or those historians who have taken up their cause, with all their confused and anxiety-ridden appeals for recognition and help — lambasting them as devious social-climbers, publicity-seekers, scoundrels and charlatans — we need to come to the study with humility, patience, and subtle analytical skills. We are dealing with evidence that has been deliberately kept out of view, obscured by generations of fear, and coated by layer upon layer of protective dissimulation. For that reason, when we wonder at the intrepidity — or foolishness — of Marranos who not only stayed in jurisdictions where the Inquisition and the purity of blood regulations remained in force but also often moved back and forth from safe to dangerous lands, it is important to recall that, whatever the moral or spiritual status of the suspected Judaizers, they themselves felt they could negotiate, manipulate, and avoid the forces ranged against them. To a great degree, as Uchmany points out, both sides in this game of cat and mouse were educated middle-class men and women and each group felt they could outwit the other as a point of honour. Many of the opponents of the 60 61

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 187. Ibid, p. 188.

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Marranos were themselves of Jewish ancestry, and used their own family experiences in the task of searching out and prosecuting those who remained in one way or another loyal to their Hebrew heritage. In addition, it also became clear to many Crypto-Jews who thought of escaping to the Near and Middle East, that persecution was also rife in many Catholic and Protestant territories, and while there was often more security under Ottoman rule the Dhimmi regulations and the very foreign culture were not as appealing as playing the game of self-concealment in a language and a culture that was familiar and with opponents who were also familiar — and even family. Thus Uchmany writes: New Christians often developed the ability to slip in and out between Christian and Jewish societies. They knew how to behave properly in both the synagogue and the church, and they had mastered several languages. This ability — born in them as a consequence of religious coercion — permitted some of them to leave behind for a while the miserable opportunities and economic situation of the ghettos and to search for better opportunities in the Iberian empires.62

What exactly it means to have such an ability “born in them” is not provided, and seems a passing metaphor, a colourful way of saying that families taught their children how to behave. Yet I contend that there is more to it than an elegant use of rhetoric. Transformations in the way that New Christian were nurtured and fit into the family meant that part of the old Jewish child-rearing traditions were lost, replaced by adoption of more conventional Christian modes, shaped by class considerations, of course; but also, the tensions in the emotional life of mothers and other care-givers would be passed on to offspring in a more organic way — through the unconscious influence on the hormonal release of chemical triggers to the refined arboration of neurons and axons in the brain and related nervous systems. It is also likely that new regimes of discipline were installed in the household since parents could no longer trust their children, or themselves, in a free and raucous display of emotions and playfulness. Because members of the household could not fully depend on the loyalty of one another and were particularly fearful of small boys and girls saying or doing things that would put everyone at risk, the children grew up aware that they too had to be cautious — and indeed, very clever — in how they bonded with family, society, and the institutions of authority. Uchmany also indicates that as a consequence of these kinds of somatic and psychological conditions, “Many crypto-Jews had seemingly lost the ability to put down roots anywhere and wandered from one place to another” (p. 194). This rootlessness and nomadism are more familiar to us as features 62

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 194.

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of secular modernity than of supposedly stable pre-modern communities. Yet we see here more than a psychological state; there is also the conditioning for the kind of imperial, commercial and intellectual freedom to move that created the modern world. Matched with this wanderlust and unease with trust in fixed communities, there was also the constant requirement to hide one’s feelings and thoughts behind façades of normality and conventionality. Even more, given the expectation of a messianic breakthrough in compensation for all this suffering and persecution, individuals were ever on the alert for signs of the impending apocalypse. Again to cite Uchmany: Certainly, every irregular and strange happening was seen as a sign of His impending arrival. Simple as well as educated men believed with all their hearts that God had not forgotten His people. Thanks to this deep and genuine faith, which was at the same time the kind of futuristic ideology that helps people to cope with tragedies, the survivors of the autos-da-fé — in which their family and friends had been devoured by flames — had the strength and energy to educate their children in their ancestral creed. For fear of being discovered, the crypto-Jews educated their small children as Christians. They revealed their children’s true identities and initiated them into Judaism when they reached the ages of twelve and thirteen.63

However, these generalizations need several modifications and adjustments because of the wider psychohistorical lens and more specifically Jewish perspective we are offering in this book. Working backwards through this passage, we need to point out that the error in Uchmany’s approach is that she tends to take documents at face value and treats these highly charged and traumatic circumstances as working by conscious and rational means. Not all children would be considered ready or worthy of knowing the family’s secret identity, and yet under certain circumstances children as young as seven or eight might be initiated into the concealed religion. That religion was not the ancestral faith since it came through at least two filters: on the one hand, the fragmentation and forgetting of large parts of traditional rabbinic learning meant that only some aspects were preserved, and even these were skewed by Christian ideologies of prayer and theology. On the other hand, the dominance of females in the home and the loss of male practice in synagogue, house of study and yeshiva gave the preserved residue something other than a halachically correct Judaism. In addition, people coping with the tragic intensity of the Inquisition around them and specific events involving parents and friends do not behave with complete conscious and rational control; they are traumatized by the experience. Sometimes this traumatic experience created anger and rage against Jews and Judaism, as well as against Christians and Christianity, 63

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 196.

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and this rage could be repressed and transformed into subversive desires to assimilate as much as possible to the persecuting society in order to wreck it from within — or could lead to self-destructive acts coded into the concepts of missionary zeal, a martyr complex, or vicious reporting of loved-ones to the Holy Office. Günter Böhm provides further evidence in Chapter 10 of this same anthology64 we have been tracking, “Crypto-Jews and New Christians in Colonial Peru and Chile.” His focus is on the New World where conversos attempted to find safe havens and elude the long reach of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Böhm tells how many married Old Christians as a ploy in this game, and how they used this foothold in Christian society to develop not only their commercial activities but to integrate into the community by working with ecclesiastical and civic officials to create a new colonial society. Yet this is not just a strategic manoeuvre in the game of survival, as it also represents an honest attempt by many New Christians to live as well and fully as they could both as Christians and as secret Jews, granted always that their understanding of how to carry out this delicate and precarious balancing act was confused and muddled. As one Inquisitorial official in Lima cited by Böhm put it in 1635: . . . generally none is caught without their rosary, reliquary, icons . . . and other devotions . . . They know the catechism, pray the rosary and, when asked . . . why they pray, they reply that they never forget their prayers in times of need, as in prison, and they appear devout in order to deceive, so that they will be taken for good Christians.65

But it is insufficient to say that all that is reported here is a smear by a hostile witness, or, which may be as much, to accept the report at face value as a statement of Marranist duplicity. We need to consider that the individuals and small groups called up to answer before the Holy Office may sincerely believe in Catholic rituals and prayers, at the same time as they come to understand — under the pressure of inquisitorial interrogation and torture — that in their hearts they are Jews. The ability to hold contradictory beliefs, ideas, and emotions should not be dismissed as hypocrisy, stupidity or weakness of will, but understood as a mark of either genuine confusion or sophistication.

64 65

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West. Ibid, p. 209.

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CRYPTO-JEWS AND MARRANOS IN PORTUGUESE AMERICA Reshimu — a residue or mark that is left over after the tzimtzum. The tzimtzum was not an absolute darkness, it contained a residue because the purpose of the tzimtzum is not to make darkness but to create existence — the only way to do so was to withdraw, but not completely. Tzimtzum — quantum leap — a conceptual vacuum in the light and revelation of the Divine — not a literal space like a hole in a bagel.66

The kind of sophisticated muddle or fuzziness is not only a psychohistorical phenomenon, as we shall see further expounded by Anita Novinsky in her “Marranos and the Inquisition: On the Gold Route in Minas Gerais, Brazil,” Chapter 11 in the present anthology. But we also want to consider it from the perspective of an epistemological crisis that beset the people who were forced to try to make sense and act on what they could only partly understand. Another way of looking at such a problem is to consider it within the light of midrashic imagination, that is, a way of textualizing the crisis and interpreting it through the techniques worked out by the rabbis when they wished to adjust the received documents of their heritage to the constantly changing circumstances of their Sitz im Leben. We are not arguing that these midrashic devices were consciously learned and applied by the businessmen, physicians and other members of the secret Jewish populations dispersed throughout the Spanish Empire, but, rather, that they were already habits of mind and emotive responses inculcated in more fundamental ways before the individuals involved became aware of any strategies and policies to be used in their dayto-day affairs. There had been, for these people, an explosion of the received systems of knowledge and institutions of social governance, a scattering of the precepts and regulations of moral and practical life, and a loss of focus that made recognition of reality difficult and puzzling, and yet there was also a residue of somatically ingrained ways of thinking, feeling and acting that distinguished them from ordinary folk in the larger Old Christian society around them. The sense of discomfort, lack of fit, and asynchronization remained troubling in each person’s most private and inner being, even if it was possible to mask this cognitive and affective dissonance to most outsiders,

66

The Rebbe Rashab, “Notes on Hemshech Samech Vov by Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneerson (Rebbe RaShab) — (1860–1920)” online at file://E/TheRebbeReshab (16/06/2008).

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just as many sufferers of autism learn to mimic social etiquette and reflect back what seem to be appropriate civil behaviours. What Novinsky is able to do in her continuing investigations of secret Jewish life in colonial Brazil is to discern almost invisible and silent aspects of difference — small but extremely disturbing feelings of alienation in the members of these hidden communities. In the example of the families in the distant mining towns of inner Brazil she finds a good test case. Particularly because this isolated mining settlement is examined closely in its circumstances in the first half of the eighteenth century, a time when it has often been considered that Crypto-Judaism had faded completely, what is revealed here is of special significance to our revisionary approach. Yet in one sense, Novinsky says, after reviewing the recent literature in the field, the Crypto-Jews who went to Minas Gerais were “of a radically different mindset from the Ashkenazim Jews or the Sephardic Christian converts who spread across the Netherlands, France, and Italy” (p. 218). How so? She points to their “[h]ighly assimilated” lives and lengthy separation from any functioning Jewish institutions. They were also, quite frankly, “adventurous and violent”, and thus shockingly distinct from what we normally expect to see in a community of Jews, Crypto-Jews, or Marranos. They were bold men, rich and influential, and some might consider it a stretch to describe as still in some ways Jewish. Nevertheless, they belonged to “a secret society of New Christians,” a group made up of merchants and mining businessmen, and thus a collection of individuals who thought of themselves as different from the rest of the mining population, government officials, and clergy in the region. In her examination of a small number, whose biographies she has been able to compile, Novinsky finds them each in their way possessed of a “violent, unusual, and contradictory personality,” some perhaps more insane and desperate than the others (p. 219). They perhaps formed the secret group because they were marked out by the Inquisition and needed to strengthen their ability to defend themselves, but they were also self-selective in their cultural ambitions and sense of alienation from the families and other groups they should have felt at one with in this distant and pioneering environment. There are not only distinct characteristics of this small group which leads Novinsky to say there is not one Marranism but many. Nevertheless, everywhere you look in Brazil — and elsewhere in the New and Old Worlds where New Christians attempted to live — something also defined them as variations on a particular theme. One of these characteristics is that “The marrano represents the universal, often unconscious, condition of men who are removed from the societies in which they live.” As a man — and it is perhaps advisedly that she uses this gender distinction because the lives of female Marranas may very well have configured themselves differently, especially in the primitive and alienated communities in which they grew up or were taken to by their husbands — the 262

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Marrano is defined as one “who lives in a world without belonging to it.” This kafkaesque situation is the kind guaranteed to create, at best neurosis, at worst psychosis, but hardly any sort of normal personalities. The personalities, then, should not be approached as though they were normal, rational or selfcontrolled manifestations of people under stress at one or more points in their lives. Their paradoxical nature and shifting allegiances mark them as products of a sustained crisis of identity. According to Anita Novinsky, who is one of the leading experts in the study of Brazil’s fuzzy Jews, “These secret New Christian associates offered support, security, and credit to each despite the knowledge that, if arrested, all members would denounce one another” (p. 227). It is this grotesque imbalance that is so difficult to describe in action when historians review the archival documents. While she can see that the group as a whole is divided into two sub-sets, one which practiced some form of Crypto-Judaism and the other “for whom religion was a problem rather than a source of comfort”, Novinsky is caught on hooks of her paradigm that cannot resolve the tension between the two except in terms of secrecy, symbolic codes concerning ancestry and current beliefs. Perhaps, in one sense, there could be no resolution because the people concerned could never feel comfortable in any place or any system of beliefs and the tension is precisely the factor that identifies them and is passed on in non-conceptual form through the deformed and dysfunctional family life they all experienced. In another sense, as Nathan Wachtel suggested earlier, there is more than an amorphous tension that makes the men in rural Brazil come together in these bizarre mutual-help societies. The suspicions of the Inquisition and the jealousy of business rivals in the community are likely to give a name to the group’s behaviour and they may take the badge of shame as their medal of honour as New Christians — meaning of impure Jewish blood and insincere Christian beliefs. Yet it is a shared memory of oppression, anxiety and wandering that gives some ideological substance to their self-images. “With its various regional subtleties,” writes Novinsky, “Marranism in Brazil was a long-standing phenomenon featuring traits that defy generalization” — and awkward and uncomfortable as it was to those who lived inside the anamorphic experience, “Brazilian Marranism must be understood in the context of the formation of Brazilian culture, a culture that the Marranos unwittingly helped to create.”67 Geraldo Pieroni provides a slightly different point of view in his “Outcasts from the Kingdom: The Inquisition and the Banishment of New Christians to Brazil,” also found in Bernardini and Fiering‘s The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West. This important essay not only looks at the metaphoric, or perhaps mythic, significance of banishment within the late medieval and 67

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 230.

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early modern Portuguese mentality, it also confronts the notion of fear itself. Pieroni pulls no punches: “fear,” he asserts, “was institutionalised.”68 We all know that the victims of the Inquisition, from even before they were singled out for arrest and torture, feared this dreaded institution and lived their lives under its heavy shadow. But the Portuguese Kingdom and the Church lived in a state of fear — fear of the other and what the presence of the other did to their own identity and self-realized concepts of how State and Church should operate. The end of the Reconquista in Iberia and the centralization into relatively stable monarchic entities led to fear that the new states and the new religious hegemony were insecure, and were not pure and sacred essences. The expansion of both Spain and Portugal — and for Spain this included European territories outside the Romance-speaking zones — exaggerated the fear of both an enemy within and a crushing hostility without. The new boundaries had to be clarified and turned into powerful walls to hold the body politic together. Thus, on the one hand, there was an increasing internal banishment imposed on dangerous and subversive criminal and heretical individuals; something analogous to, yet distinct from what Foucault describes as the “great incarceration” in the West as the bourgeois enlightenment sought to stabilize its new anti-feudal structures. Both the crown’s legal system and the ecclesiastical courts worked in parallel, says Pieroni, to impose this form of punishment in order to cleanse the kingdom of its unclean infiltrators. But it soon became clear that internal banishment to “preserves” in the heart of the countryside was not enough. There also had to be exile to the new hinterlands, the as-yet unstructured colonies in the New World. While the Spaniards expelled, first, the Jews, and a little later, the Moors, Portugal sought a way to keep the much-needed knowledge and skills of the Jews by a combination of mass conversion and a temporary backing away from inquisitorial testing of the inner persons involved. Both forms of banishment, internal and external, sought to keep the suspected others inside the newly expanded body politic and at the same time outside the civilized and courtly towns and cities. The Inquisition served as an agent of both the State and the Church in monitoring, scrutinizing and disciplining the tolerated other: we take toleration here in the sense in which a disease is tolerated — not as a liberal policy of inclusive pluralism. Banishment in this sense, as opposed to expulsion, was a form of purgation, indeed, it was the political concomitant of the concept of Purgatory. As Pieroni puts it, “banishment, like purgatory, was a strict but transitory sentence.” In regard to Judaizers, it was meant to rid the nation of Judaism and Jewishness, but not of Jews who would become better New Christians because of the ordeal.

68

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 243.

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If the Holy Office seems therefore to be a psychotic institution in the service of a psychotic State and Church, the result of the Holy Office’s powers to threaten and discipline the enemies of Christ meant that, when it did not actually kill its victims, it drove them crazy. This is very much what justifies our claim that it was part of the vast and complex, overly complex, contraption that was grinding away at the souls of all people within its jurisdictions, not least those secret Jews, confused and being driven mad, and who created their own counter-contraption to try to escape the full effects of the other. Here are Pieroni’s closing words on the Marrano condition: Dominated by fear, they were subjected to severe degradation in their personal lives, which for many ended in exile to a distant land, a punishment aimed at both social exclusion and purification of souls. The exclusion of undesirable elements from the community was used by the ancien regime as a means of achieving social normalization. The practice of banishment was an obvious form of social vengeance against transgressors of royal laws, For the Inquisition, banishment functioned as what was believed to be a necessary religious and social defense [sic] against heterodox infection, while at the same time, serving as a mystical procedure for the purification of sins.69

FROM TOLERATION TO EXPULSION IN THE FRENCH ZONES The foundation of hashgasha is the lack of deterministic cause and effect, i.e., A must lead to B. Hashgasha assumes that A usually leads to B but sometimes it can lead to C or D or E (“open possibility”) . . . But sometimes the laws function differently, even backwards . . . 70

The hints are right there in the record, but in forms of allusion and evasiveness, constantly pointing away from its own centre and dispersing itself behind a variety of disguised and dissimulated false fronts. The movement from point A to B is not direct or even always visible. The tracks sometimes divide and twist over backroads, sometimes dive under the earth like rivers that flow through invisible tunnels, sometimes seem just to end and are never again to be 69 70

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 250. Yosef Gavriel Bachhofer, “Summary of HaMapaspik Lóvdei Hashem of R. Avraham ben HaRambam — Bitachon, by Erich Kauffmanm, with his Notes.” http://rygb.blogspot. com/2007/11/summary-of-hamaspik-lovdei-hashem-of-r.

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found, their force and content forever unseen. Yet like the power of the divine discernable after the fact through interpretation, as well as not just amenable to but requiring invasive re-actualization, these hints are finally the essence itself. How so? There are four essays in this section of The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West and they now reach beyond the Iberian experience to see how Jews and Marranos fared under French rule. By looking at these studies we can expand our understanding of the counter-contraption and its relationship to the Penitentes because we are forced to test our evidence and our interpretations in regard to circumstances beyond that of Iberian paradigms. To begin this additional expansion of the perspective, Gérard Nahon’s chapter called “The Portuguese Jewish Nation of Saint-Esprit-Lès-Bayonne: The American Dimension” examines certain French archival records. This allows Nahon to explore the relationship between the Jews in metropolitan France and their families and commercial enterprises across the Atlantic, in other words, the nation — the counter-contraption — composed of men and women who are now dispersed into different religious beliefs, linguistic zones, and legal jurisdictions. One of the key features is that of what Nahon cites Anne Zinc calling “Jewish Atlantic endogamy”,71 the marriage of young Jews in the metropolis and in the colonies. He then looks at how the American experience was internalized by those who remained in Bayonne, and particularly how the failed Dutch control of northeastern Brazil caused more than just nostalgia for an exotic haven, but disappointment tinged with hope for the establishment of places freed from the old anti-Jewish constraints. Already at this early stage, the idea of America as the future base for Jewish settlement was established in the imagination of these Sephardim in European exile. Such an imagined ideal was just one of the several that the apparatus of cunning and disguise could produce. That it could, then, means that the other decisions and constructions were not inevitable — and therefore that the original choices did not in themselves determine the course of historical development as though the persons making those decisions had withdrawn themselves from history. On the contrary, they plunged themselves into the turbulent and indeterminate currents of history, and each group and each individual was forced thereafter to make the best of what resources they had at their disposal in the specific circumstances they found themselves in. Shifting away from the Bayonne connection, Silvia Marzagalli examines “Atlantic Trade and Sephardim Merchants in Eighteenth-Century France; The Case of Bordeaux.” Indicating that in this period in Bordeaux one out of every four or five merchants was Jewish, Marzagalli says “The aim of this essay is to 71

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 258.

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demonstrate the possible value of such research.” In other words, “What was the place and importance of Jewish merchants in eighteenth-century Bordeaux, and how did they participate in the Atlantic trade?”72 In terms of the mentalités of this group, it is important to note that “French authorities pretended or assumed that [they] were Christian . . . since they publicly conformed to the Catholic religion: they let their children be baptized, they married in front of a Catholic priest, and they were buried in Catholic cemeteries.”73 But as we have already noted, words like “pretended” or “assumed” and “conformed” and “let” are just the beginning of the story — the story being a much more complex and psychologically confused set of events. How much so is hinted at in Marzagalli’s report that “After the turn of the century, Jewish families abandoned the fiction of Catholicism and no longer let their children be baptized.”74 That little word “let” can either mean “allowed” in the sense of a conscious strategic decision or that they “were relatively unaware that there was anything untoward in this decision.” To find the answer is partly possible in analysis of the waves of immigration from Portugal and keying these arrivals with the degree of persecution they had undergone from state and church, and this is what Marzagalli does; and yet it is only a small part of the story. On the face of it, new arrivals who had been subjected to persecution under Don Pedro may indeed have been more attached to their secret Judaism and therefore less likely to accede to continued deceptions once they were out of Iberian jurisdiction. However, that is not a necessary conclusion. From what we know about the Marrano temperament and personality, it may be that these escapees would have been more cautious about “coming out” so soon, or, another very real possibility, like many other Marranos, their faith had been reshaped to centre on the act of concealment itself and not in a nostalgia for a rabbinic Jewish set of practices they were hardly cognizant of. How these Marranos affected the already settled community of New Christians in Bordeaux therefore remains to be discovered. The Bordeaux Jewish merchants — taking the term in its widest and fuzziest acceptance — had connections throughout the French New World colonies, in many of which their agents, that is, their family members, needed to maintain the disguise of Catholicism and could not risk antagonizing local governments and jealous rivals by coming out as practicing Jews. After all, as Marzagalli herself writes, while Bordeaux was relatively safe, “in the French colonies . . . Jews did not enjoy the same degree of security and . . . their 72 73 74

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 270. Ibid, p. 271. Ibid, p. 272.

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position was, in fact, most precarious” (p. 273). The transformed attitude cannot be easily passed over as a logical outcome of either circumstances in Bordeaux or in relation to the arrival of a new wave of persecuted refugees from Portugal. Activities by the Jesuits in the West Indies and in France may have had something to do with shifting attitudes of merchant Jews in relation to their public identities. In the 1680s, for instance, when other nations of the West were relaxing some of the regulations against Jews, Louis XIV was cracking down, particularly in the island territories where Jesuit influence was strongest. Yet tolerance was possible, always provided the overseas agents did not appear publicly to be Jews. Moreover, taking a wider perspective on these seemingly contradictory facts concerning why and how the Jews of Bordeaux should have felt more comfortable about revealing their Jewishness while their own sons and cousins had to exercise great caution in the West Indies — and therefore why it did not seem dangerous to be a secret Jew in the colonies while one’s parents were openly Jewish in the metropolis — we have to remind ourselves of how essentially anti-Jewish the Enlightenment was, perhaps to the point of being defined by its disgust with what Judaism supposedly stood for in the European scheme of things. Rationality in the emergent paradigm set itself against the supposedly most obvious symbol of superstition and irrationality: the Jew. Obviously Marzagelli, with her focus mainly on economic matters, does not deal in depth (or at all) with these inner contradictions of eighteenth-century French experience. We do not dismiss “the complex network of finance, insurance, and banking services” as mere epiphenomena in creating the “complete picture” of Jewish and New Christian life in the time and place designated by this article, but we do not think they are adequate to explain the emotional and psychological life of the people involved. Saying finally that Bordeaux “is unique”75 hardly resolved the issue. The next chapter “Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies in the Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Cayenne) and the ‘Black Code’” is by Mordechai Arbell. He goes over familiar history here but fleshes it out with new details — names of people, statistics of trade, and geographical routes taken. However, by limiting himself to the archival details his generalizations on what people felt and experienced within themselves sounds hollow. The assumption is that, not only did Jews and Christians meet each other in fully conscious ways, but that they came to each other in the same way as our own contemporary experiences would lead us to act and think and feel. An official letter of 4 July 1743, for example, is cited to give evidence of attitudes on Haiti to Jewish settlers: 75

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 281.

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In St. Louis, M. de Paz has had several male and female children from a black woman to whom he is very loving. She was liberated from slavery years ago, but he has not married her. To the children he is very tender and has sent them to his parents in Bordeaux to be educated.”76

Arbell does not analyze these remarks, using this and similar passages only to speak about population figures, migration, and legal status. But the words call out for a discussion on what “love” and “tenderness” mean, and why M. de Paz did not marry the mother of his beloved children whom he cared enough about to send to his own parents for their education in France. Were these children then brought up as Jews? Would de Paz have taken his commonlaw wife back to Bordeaux and introduced her to his family? Did she know he was a Crypto-Jew and would she have cared? The cemeteries in Surinam and Curaçao show that many former slaves were converted to Judaism and at certain periods were buried in their own section of the graveyard. Was the anti-Jewish “Black Code” so threatening that a loving father could not stand up for his wife and children, or did M. de Paz put business considerations above love and tenderness? The questions related to race relations come more to the fore in John D. Garrigus, “New Christians/’New Whites’: Sephardic Jews, Free People of Color, and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue, 1760–1789.” As in the previous chapter, the main focus is on economic history, and only in passing are remarks made that fit the disciplines of mentalities or psychohistory. Garrigus attempts to set out some of the contradictions in France of the lumières but does not explore the implications of the tension between what has been called Enlightenment versus Anti-Enlightenment. He does “hypothesize that colonial Sephardim provided free people of color with an important example of how to reclaim their French identity,”77 but how exactly could they “reclaim” that which was yet to be established and, moreover, is “identity” a matter of individual choice or political construction? Certainly, as he points out, attitudes were changing, but, then again, what is an “attitude” and how does it “change”? Skin colour and religious belief become key factors in the colonies, but this is a grotesque collocation of terms, since (putting aside “shades” of opinion) “race” in this pseudo-scientific sense hardly fits the same category as “belief ” — how can it be measured and by whom? How can it be differentiated from affiliation? There is no question that the French at this time were seeking “to replace old corporate labels with new secular, individualistic categories in the colonies.”78 The question is: What did it feel like to be caught up in this paradigm shift? Perhaps we have to say, at the least, unlike the black African slaves who were part of 76 77 78

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 303. Ibid, p. 316. Ibid, p. 326.

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the legal muddle and who could not return to their homelands to reaffirm what they believed about who they were, the Jewish merchants in the colonies, as we have seen, did not cut themselves off from their families elsewhere in Europe, some of whom felt safe enough to declare their identity as Jewish, others who had lingering doubts and withheld the public change, others who preferred to be neither one thing nor the other, and others who just didn’t know and from time to time put on new masks.

JEWS IN DUTCH AMERICA . . . Jews . . . grappled with and grafted the past onto different situations, both internal and external, to contest and mediate authority. — Dean Phillip Bell79

This section of the anthology we have been tracking now moves away from Catholic dominated powers and belief-systems to the Protestant trading empire of the Dutch. It also highlights categories of self-definition open to Jews that were not in evidence in such a clear way among the Iberian nations or in French controlled lands. Chapter 17 is by Jonathan I. Israel and takes on the broad topic of “The Jews of Dutch America.” He stresses the importance of the Jewish settlers and their main settlement in Curaçao as the bridge between the diverse European religious and political players in the New World. While refining the geographical relationships based on developing and receding trade networks, Israel does come closer to the human side of the history. For instance, when turning to the brief Dutch control over northeastern Brazil, he says, The most important factor for this striking difference [between the Dutch and the Spanish, Portuguese and French circumstances], in my view, lies not in any European factor but rather in the psychological cultural, and economic consequences of the relatively brief, but profound, Jewish experience in Brazil. (p. 340)

Most of the emphasis in his discussion, however, seems to focus on the economic details, rather than the cultural, let alone the psychological. Economics are important to be sure, but in themselves they do not explain how, in his own words, “[a] new kind of Jewish society had been created, quite different from any previous Jewish society in the Old World . . . ” (p. 342). Not only did this shortlived settlement spark the imagination of Jews in many parts of Europe and the 79

Dean Phillip Bell, Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany: Memory, Power and Community (Aldershot, Hamps and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007) p. 154.

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Middle East, but even after the Portuguese reasserted their authority and the Inquisition once again imposed its will on the New Christians who remained behind, the image of this Recife adventure continued to stand as an ideal. It was certainly in the minds of the Jews who went on to settle in Surinam and in Nieu Amsterdaam. What this author leaves out, several of the subsequent chapters do deal with. Thus we look to Wim Klooster’s “The Jews in Suriname and Curaçao.” Amidst the usual economic and political information, he writes of a small incident in Curaçao in 1682. Spanish sailors, reportedly in accordance with an old custom, hoisted a dummy to the masthead of their vessel on Maundy Thursday, and put it on fire. The dummy not only represented Judas Iscariot, it was also an effigy of Curaçao’s rabbi. The Dutch factor of the slave trade, Balthasar Beck, who apparently greeted the spectacle with approval, was dismissed from the post of captain of the civil guard. (pp. 353–354)

The note appended to this citation gives some background to the festive ritual: The spectacle had roots in medieval Europe, where Judas was hanged with a moneybag suspended from his neck to personify avarice. All of the standard forms of Jewish dress were applied to Judas. (p. 365, n. 25)

The figure of Judas became quite spectacular in the festivals of Central America and Mexico in later years, but here still among the Spanish sailors it runs the medieval course of anti-Semitic slanders. Yet we have to ask, first, what a Spanish vessel was doing in Dutch Protestant waters, and thus engaged in the quasi-illegal trade between the island colony and the South American ports that led to Curaçao’s financial success. Why Beck winked at the slur against the local rabbi needs no special explanation given the Dutch governor’s history of anti-Semitism, to be found as well in Pietr Stuyvesant when he went to Nieu Amsterdaam. One may say, at least, that in Curaçao as in Surinam, the Jews were relatively safe, since being burned in effigy is far better than in an auto de fe. This takes us to Chapter 19, “An Atlantic Perspective on the Jewish Struggle for Rights and Opportunities in Brazil, New Netherlands, and New York” by James Homer Williams. Crucial to this history is the period during which the crowns of Spain and Portugal were united and Portuguese New Christians began to cross over both into Spain itself and into the Spanish territories of America. Calling themselves the Naçio or in Dutch the Portugeesche Natie, they included many of the Sephardim who had crossed into neighbouring Portugal in 1492 and thus were caught up in the mass conversions of 1497, but also the New Christians who spread throughout Europe, the Levant and the Mediterranean Islands, forming in this way an international mercantile empire 271

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within an empire. So extensive was this commercial network that the very name Portuguese came to signify Jew, both Crypto-Jews and practicing Jews. Until well into the seventeenth century, moreover, the Naçio constituted the main and most influential section of Dutch Jewry. Williams suggests that in this South American colony, “Portuguese Christians enjoyed greater political rights, in spite of their disloyalty, than Dutch Jews enjoyed,”80 and it would only be in New York, after the Dutch left, that such imbalances began to disappear in the New World. In other words, when we speak of rights and tolerance of Jews — however broadly the word is taken — it is always in relative terms to the condition of Christian citizens and subjects. Whatever influence came their way because of commercial knowledge and financial skills, they were always thought of in the manner Stuyvesant did when he called the Jews a “deceitful; race” and “hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ.”81 There is no special pleading necessary therefore to explain the persistence of Crypto-Judaism as a way of life outside of Holland itself and the early British North American colonies. In Chapter 20 Rachel Frankel looks at “Antecedents and Remnants of Jodensavanne: The Synagogues and Cemeteries of the First Permanent Plantation Settlement of New World Jews.” Like other colonists, the Jews in this part of Guiana built their economy on slave labour, with all the sins that attend that peculiar institution. However, in perspective of the times, there is no reason why these settlers from Europe should have behaved differently from the majority culture of Protestants and Catholics. Jews, too, very recently had been slaves of one sort or another, whether as indentured labour, long-term unpaid servants of the crown, prisoners-of-war or kidnapped victims. Often, slaves on Jewish plantations were converted and circumcised and played an active part in communal synagogue life. They would sometimes run off into the bush and then, in order to maintain their independent life, raid the farms for women, tools, and food, leading to Jews undertaking militia duties to protect their plantations and recapture their missing slaves. But it would be difficult to task the Jewish settlers with the cruelty displayed by the extreme Calvanist colony of Labadiste utopians just down the road. As a functioning Jewish community, Jodensavanne looked to Amsterdam for aid and sometimes to Curaçao. Frankel examines the synagogue architecture and regulations to parse out the nature of the rabbinical customs developed in this enclave of Jewish near home-rule. Since many of the customs developed to keep a low profile in situations where Jews were at best a tolerated minority, the conditions in Surinam allowed for experimentation in both the physical layout of the houses of worship and the social relations institutionalized by the 80 81

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 377. Ibid., p. 379.

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community. According to Frankel, for instance, on the one hand, the height of the building and the placement of windows could adapt to the climate; and on the other, “Jews of African descent enjoyed fuller rights than they did in subsequent years and in other places.”82 In addition, the author points out, “At Jodensavanne the women faced the ark and the whole of the sanctuary, as a conventional audience does a stage. Also, the women’s gallery was set back from the men’s sanctuary, rather than above it”.83 Summing up these developments, Frankel says, “the town was laid out as if in a perfect world” with “idealized geometry” and grounded on “the age-old messianic hope” the inhabitants of Jodensvanne believed would reach fruition not only soon but in their own promised land.84 In this idealism and messianic expectation, the Jews in Surinam nevertheless could not shake themselves free of the old anxieties and some of the familiar features of the Sephardic synagogue — the faux windows and the sand on the floor, for instance — “may express the persistence of the masking, secrecy, and illusion practiced by crypto-Jews in places where the Inquisition existed.”85 In an interesting aside, Frankel suggests some connection between this Marrano tradition of duplicity and masking culture of the Black slaves brought from Africa: The African techniques of masking, secrecy, and illusion persisted in Suriname not only because they were universally familiar to the diverse population of Africans, but also because they provided strategies required for survival under the institution of New World slavery.86

We might begin to look further into the analogies and possible inter-action between Marrano and African strategies of deceit, deception, and duplicity, and take as a starting point the notorious dream or night-vision of Bishop Lobo on the island of São Tomé during the 1620s, a bizarre oneiric event in which the Christian cleric, sent to the West African Portuguese colony to root out judaizing New Christians, believed he witnessed a ritual procession of “Jews” celebrating the Golden Calf and in which modern folklorists think they detect evidence of black slave rebelliousness. Frankel points towards some avenues of approach in her discussion of “the Jewish converts and offspring of Jewish fathers and African, non-Jewish mothers” but this, unfortunately, is not followed through. Yet she reports that “At the end of the eighteenth century, a synagogue of the Jews of African descent existed in Paramaribo”87 and that these people 82 83 84 85 86 87

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 409. Ibid., p. 416. Ibid., p. 419. Ibid., p. 420. Ibid., p. 422. Ibid., p. 425.

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founded a society of their own in 1759 and called their house of worship Darkhei Yesharim (The Ways of the Righteous). All that remains of this strange synthesis are heart-shaped sankofa and akoma symbols found in Sephardic cemeteries associated with Surinamese Jewry.88

“BROKERS OF THE WORLD” IN A BROKEN AND BAROQUE WORLD . . . for I would by no means be thought to comprehend those Persons of surprising Genius, the Authors of immense Romances, or the modern Novel and Atlantis writers; who without any Assistance from Nature or History, record Persons who never were, or will be, and Facts which never did nor possibly can happen . . . — Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742)

The four chapters constituting this section of the same anthology we keep following begins with Seymour Drescher’s “Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade.” Having been charged with disturbing ideological overtones by a series of pamphlets and speeches delivered by the Nation of Islam in a way to implicate modern Jews as instigators and major players in the Atlantic slave trade, particularly in regard to the United States, Jewish scholars have to be extremely sensitive in responding to this slander — not least because many of the accusations are made in the words of Jewish historians who in the past, innocently, sought to highlight their own people’s participation in the creation of the New World. It needs to be pointed out, first, as Drescher does, that Jews actually played a relatively minor role in the slave trade and in the institution of a slave economy in the Americas, usually only in the opening years when the peculiar institution was small, high-risk and undeveloped as a racial phenomenon; secondly, also indicated here, that Arab Muslim slavers had been and continued to be intensely active in Africa, often in collusion with local tribal governments; and thirdly, not touched upon in this chapter, that Jews themselves were enslaved in several ways during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, although this should not mitigate our own disgust at the practice.

88

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 426.

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Drescher reminds us: “Jews could not live openly or securely anywhere along the European Atlantic seaboard during the first century after the Columbian expedition, the century in which the Euro-African coastal supply systems and the Iberian-American slave systems were created.” Moreover, from another angle, “In a confessionally intolerant Europe and its overseas extensions, it was virtually impossible for Jews to hold the principal managerial positions in official slave trading entities.”89 Again, a little later Drescher writes: . . . Portugal’s stigmatization of New Christians as members of a legally separate and inherited status also rendered its members subject to endless genealogical scrutiny, humiliation, confiscation, and violence from generation to generation.90

This kind of sustained trauma may explain why, to the embarrassment of modern Jews, the New Christians in the past, even Crypto-Jews, can be seen as behaving in harsh, insensitive, even at times cruel ways; and while this may highlight the generally worse treatment of slaves by the Christian and Muslim majority cultures, it does not excuse the Jews involved — it merely provides an explanation, in the same way as we come to understand why battered and abused children so often grow up to be violent themselves. Nevertheless these factors need to be noted: that in its first centuries of operation the European involvement with slavery was overwhelmingly Christian, not Jewish and that slavery was an economic relationship before it was a racial category. The misbehaviour of individuals cannot be translated into a condemnation of Judaism as a cause or significant proponent of the Atlantic slave system. Indeed, at the very time this system transformed from a relatively small enterprise to a major economic determinant, New Christians “simply faded into obscurity”91 and the so-called Jewish presence “was too ephemeral, too localized, and too limited to have made an appreciable difference.”92 Chapter 22 by James C. Boyajian deals with “New Christians and Jews in the Sugar Trade, 1550–1750: Two Centuries of Development of the Atlantic Economy.” Where Drescher remarks in a note that Portuguese and Spanish complaints about Jewish (converso) rivalry in trade were in regard to the sugar trade not the slave trade, Boyajian explores this sector of Early Modern commerce. Again, it needs to be said that New Christian involvement here was relatively limited both in the numbers of families concerned and in the proportionate influence on policies by major players. That the production of sugar depended on slave labour goes without question, but aside from the 89 90 91 92

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 443. Ibid., p. 444. Ibid., p. 454. Ibid., p. 455.

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short-lived dominance in the trade of São Tomé and then the Jewish role in Dutch Brazil the entire industry was in the hands of Christian merchants — with small-scale Jewish and New Christian investments.93 The high point may have reached 20% in the Dutch Brazil colony, but everywhere else it was much lower, with Sephardic Jews, excluding conversos, virtually absent from the slave trade and the production of sugar,94 particularly after the 1630s.95 When the centre of such trade shifted to the West Indies and the creation of the Triangle of slaves, sugar, and rum, “Jews were unwelcome competitors to the creole merchants . . . as they had been to Old Christians in the Iberian Peninsula . . . The result of this persecution on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Iberian overseas colonies was to reduce the survivors to a popularly despised caste, distinct from an Old Christian majority . . . ”96 I have belaboured this point because of its misuse as anti-Jewish propaganda in the United States today, a matter of grave concern because of the rising anti-Semitism throughout the world in the last several years. This brings us to Chapter 23, “New Christians as Sugar Cultivators and Traders in the Portuguese Atlantic, 1450–1800” by Ernst Pijning. This essay refines further some of the points already made in the above two reviews, but also focuses somewhat on the personalities and personal experiences of the New Christian involved in the sugar trade. Statistics on marriage gives some useful information, such as most New Christians arrived as bachelors in the colonies, about a third to a quarter married merchants’ daughters, “and the rest married daughters of landowners, professionals, and artisans.”97 The period between arrival as a young unmarried man and the taking of a wife covered several years of apprenticeship as a clerk, the two voyages to the slave stations to bring back workers, and then a return to see if he could earn sufficient to take a wife. It is likely that most of these men did not remain celibate during these years of bachelorhood, especially when slave women were available as mistresses. This was probably less true for practicing Jews who settled in northeastern Brazil during Dutch rule. Pijning does not follow this line of inquiry further, and the only hint at a possible development appears in passing reference to the increasing presence of mulattos in Brazil and Surinam. Piter Emmer’s “The Jewish Moment and the Two Expansion Systems in the Atlantic, 1580–1650” comes as Chapter 24. These two systems represent northwestern European activities in the New World and Iberian imperial ambitions, with Jews, Crypto-Jews and New Christians playing what Emmer 93 94 95 96 97

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 475. Ibid., p. 476. Ibid., p. 479. Ibid., p. 481. Ibid., p. 488.

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considers “a distinct role in both.”98 The distinctive qualities of each system as something other than an economic enterprise points towards psycho-historical developments. The Spanish and Portuguese imposed a single religious culture on their territories, and tended to create versions of their own urban, feudalized societies, with large haciendas in the hinterland and incorporating “a substantial Amerindian element”, whereas the northern Europeans brought smaller dissenting Protestant traditions, did not at first create cities as administrative centres, and had little participation by the indigenous populations. The Spanish and Portuguese not only converted the Indians they conquered, but made them priests, sent them to universities built in the New World, and developed a mixed-race population rather quickly. Emmer suggests that the failure of these Iberian colonies to develop an efficient agricultural base can be compared to the oil-exporting regions of the Middle East today: cash crops led to money, along with the booty treasures of Latin America, going to Iberia and then being spent on luxury goods paid to craftsmen and merchants in the north, who then used this new wealth to create their mercantile empires. The origins of this massive commercial haemorrhaging of the first expansion system go back to the emigration of the Jews and New Christians from the Iberian Peninsula. In order to survive, these exiles and emigrants took their commercial know-how, their connections and family ties, and their international language skills to the port cities of the second system, to commercial centers such as Bayonne, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, London, and Hamburg.99

Jewish leaders had already warned the Spanish Monarchs that this was likely to happen in order to prevent the disaster of 1492 and this may have been part of the thinking behind the cynical Portuguese ploy to convert all Jews en masse in 1497 to prevent the loss of the commercial middle classes. In addition, of course, Jews expelled to the Ottoman Empire also used their influence and wealth to check Iberian expansion in the Mediterranean and in the East. Nor should it be forgotten that the “Inquisition tended to stifle all trade, not only that of vulnerable merchants.”100 “No wonder,” Emmer says, “that later, during the seventeenth century, some Portuguese pamphleteers pleaded for the return of the expelled Cristãos novos, but it was too late.”101 A single chapter makes up this last section of The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, Jonathan D. Sarna’s “The Jews in British America.” This is a more familiar and perhaps simpler history than that of Jews in the Iberian colonies, and what is interesting is that “[n]o religious authority of any kind in 98 99 100 101

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 501. Ibid., p. 504. Ibid., p. 507. Ibid., p. 507.

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colonial North America possessed sufficient status to challenge the authority of the laity,”102 suggesting that one reason for the liberal developments of this branch of Judaism until the massive migration from Eastern Europe at the close of the nineteenth century may be in this openness to the emerging democratic principles of what would become the United States and later Canada. Like the rest of the population, during the eighteenth century, Jews absorbed the ideas of the Enlightenment and benefited from the tolerant secularism of the communities they lived in. Since they did not have to organize their lives around strategies of defence and separation from the Christian majority, Jews began “to change the very way that they thought about themselves,”103 as one minority religious community among many.

102 103

Bernardini and Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, p. 523. Ibid., p. 529.

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PENITENTES AND THE CRAZY THINGS THEY DO: OR, HOW TO BE JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN AT THE SAME TIME

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What counts is not a heartfelt rapport with the community, as epitomized by the Nazarene, but the transmission of sacred power. The consecration, in fact, is valid only if performed by an ordained minister. Paradoxically the Mass is null and void if it is celebrated by a community of people who gather in the name of Jesus without a priest, while it is valid if performed by a consecrated celibate in private form, or in presence of a crowd of faithful who ignore each other. All this is perfectly logical: if the Eucharist is a sacrifice and not a Supper in the memory of Jesus, for them the “minister who sacrifices” is enough, since the faithful are insignificant for the purpose of the cult. — Luigi De Paoli1

1

Luigi De Paoli, Psychoanalysis of Christianity trans by the author online at http://www.

tevere.org/home_ing. 280

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What seems to upset the so-called Anglo/Protestant viewers of Penitente practice, particularly the self-flagellation and acts of ritualized crucifixion seen in Holy Week? Is it that these are outrageous, shocking and crazy things to do.2 Of course, they are: and not only to staid, middle-class Protestant gentlemen and ladies of the Victorian era. These performances are a theatricalization of bloodletting. However, these are what holy people always do, or more accurately, within European tradition, what Catholic holy people, saints and sinners, have always done in one form or another. The Penitente ritual disciplina also seems at first like a festival of blood related to Mel Gibson’s recent obscene The Passion of Christ, although, to be sure, the Hollywood star’s film is a cinematic mock-doc representation of what supposedly really happened to Jesus on the first Easter, and not a collective ritual imitating Christ for penitential purposes and conducted in private, if not exactly in secret, for the sake of the performers and their small community and not for monetary gain and propagandistic reasons. Putting aside the question of whether the whole Passion is historical or not, that is, whether it is just a Greek misunderstanding of Hebrew midrash, created (“invented”) in a panic when the fledgling church had to cut itself away from all things Jewish during and after the Great Jewish Wars and Bar Kokhba’s Rebellion, we will take the Christian documents at face value and the Catholic 2

Miguel de Unamuno, who was born in 1864 in Bilbao, describes his youthful experience of a Holy Week procession in his native town, somewhat romantically, but with a sense of the way in which the excitement, the darkness, the crowds, the anticipation of masking, the appearance of devotees carrying statues, the disguisers dressed as Pharisees, Roman Soldiers, and the Apostles, and the by-play of young boys and girls created the wholeness of the occasion. Originally published in El Nervión on 2 March 1891, “Las processiones de Semana Santa” has been reprinted in the author’s De mi país: Descripciones, relatos y articulos de costumbres, 4th ed. (Madrid: Espasa=Calpe, 1959; orig. 1943) pp. 81–83.

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customs as legitimate traditions, and see where the Penitentes fit, and then where the Marranos fit into their moradas. Early Christian saints, particularly in the East, some more than others, performed crazy things in order to shock their contemporaries out of a sinful torpor in which supposedly they had fallen through taking this world too seriously, valuing its material and fleshly pleasures beyond any vague and distant promises of spiritual reward or punishment in the hereafter, and confusing ancient civic virtues of classical civilization with the ethics of a triumphant Christian empire.3 These shifts in temperament can be seen in the vocabulary used in the literature of the fourth century C.E. For example, in place of the classical word antiazo, meaning “approach” or “beseech,” the holy fools tended to speak in a way that required a more unusual later verb, antioó, with the sense of “prattle, babble on lightly.”4 William Harris claims that these kinds of changes in both tone and concept are part of a revolution in the imagination5 that are seen in and influenced by the New Testament. It is a transformation that puts new emphasis on the comedic, satiric and farcical elements that are relatively minor in classical texts, but they move centre stage and take on increasing significance in late Antiquity, not least in Christian writings. On occasion, holy men and women would withdraw completely from society to live in the desert, sit on stone columns, or starve themselves to death to prove their faith in things to come, trust in divine protection and spiritual athleticism in the eternal struggle against Satan. They withstood the elements, the loneliness that echoed with the voices of temptation, the images of demonic pleasures. But other than serve as models for other would-be saints, their influence on Christian life was nugatory. This is not to say, however, that there was not a subversive, cynical, Socratic and sceptical tradition always playing under the surface of Western Civilization ever since its foundations; only to separate out a certain foolishness (or foolosophy) that operates inside the acceptable bounds of Christian doctrine, that childishness and antiintellectualism that was favoured for the rambunctious and seething masses, as well as for certain orders of religious in and out of conventual houses, such as the friars minor. 3

4 5

William Harris, Archilochus: First Poet after Homer/Αρχινοχος τα Αποεπαεματα online at http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/archilochus (Seen 6 September 2006). Harris, Archilocus, p. 20. By imagination here we do not mean the modern post-Romantic sense where it is a virtual synonym for “creativity” nor do we mean the somewhat older meaning of “a specific faculty of the mind dedicated to cognition via images, irrational feelings, and analogous thought processes, in contradistinction to wit, which would be the equivalent of rational processes of thought, the ability to see distinctions and create separate categories,” etc. Rather, we mean something very close to “mentality” itself, the mind or spirit, but as expressed in words, images and actions, virtually everything which is not logos, rational speech, philosophical argument and legal categories.

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On other occasions, though, the bizarre actions of the saints took place right in the heart of the ancient city, in the marketplace, where they would defecate in public, mock communal dignitaries, or associate intimately with robbers, whores and lepers. Philip Gorski, for instance, describes the phenomenon in the Russian Church:6 Throughout the history of Russian literature, holy foolishness (iurodstvo) has been a ubiquitous motif. As an evolving theme, it remains challenging and paradoxical, constantly prompting us to reconsider the relations between “sanity” and “madness.” Most profoundly, it represents a powerful renunciation of what St. Paul called the “wisdom of this world,” to which he urged us not to be conformed since this wisdom “has been made foolish by God” (1 Cor. 1:20).

Though this is often taken as a literary tradition rather than a living paradigm, the texts cited by Gorski reveal a current of bizarre fanaticism in the Eastern Orthodox Churches that is not completely missing in the West. A character in one of the stories by Nikolai Leskov (1831–95), cited by Gorski, describes this iruodsvo as follows: In our ancient Russian land every Orthodox knows that whoever has read the Bible all the way through and has “even got to Christ,” can no longer be held strictly responsible for his actions, [for] such people are like the well known fools of God.

The tradition of the Holy Fools has carried on in the Orthodox Churches, but nevertheless there is deep in the heart of the West the example of Francis of Assisi, who went out into the world, he told his followers, to be novus pazzus, “a new fool”. The imitatio christi the Little Brothers of Saint Francis practiced was often exploited for teaching purposes, and Franciscan preaching was distinguished by its spectacular, dramatic and comic qualities. Like the Cynics of old, such as Diogenes and Crates, these holy fools went to the depths of self-degradation and humility and tossed their dignity and reputations to the winds in order to pour scorn on the hypocrites and self-righteous of their day. Here was a form of Christianity in practice and in action that was neither theologically abstruse nor mystically aloof: this was a way of plumbing to the very darkest and foulest-smelling cellars of sinfulness and then coming up roses — imitating the perfect and pure God who descended to the status of sinful man and shared in human misery and pain. In this sense, more than the often harsh realism of Pauline Christianity, which tended to prevail in the Roman Church until the twelfth century, the Franciscan model was considered more humane, humble, and affective. It certainly contrasted with the two chief 6

Philip Gorski, “Holy Fools in Russian Literature” In Communion online at http://incommunion.org/articles/previous-issues/holy-fools-in-russian-literature (Seen 3 August 2008).

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rivals of the order, beginning with the Dominicans, those domini canii or dogs of God, and then, as particularly important for consideration of what we are studying in the New Realm in the far north of New Spain, the Jesuits. In their missionizing programmes, the Franciscan friars and the Jesuit priests had two very different styles — two tonalities, affective approaches, and, even, two kinds of imaginative experience in mind when they expressed their faith. Though each was thoroughly opposed to Judaism and judaizantes as heretics and polluters of the City of God, nonetheless each was also a conduit of Crypto-Judaism and Jewish sensibilities. How so?

TWO WAYS OF BEING JEWISH IN A NON-JEWISH WORLD The complex matrix of life cannot be reduced to one story; and for that reason, the body of halakhic literature present[s] us with multiple ones. — Moshe Halbertal7 The men went to pray with their tallits in a morada in the neighborhood on Friday nights. They covered the santos in the outer alcove with gunny sacks. — Daniel Yocum8

In his latest book, Horizontal Man, José Faur9 makes some extremely disturbing and trenchant comments about the Maimonidean controversies of the Middle Ages and their impact on the mass conversions of Jews that took place during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. What Faur’s study does is more than add an extra dimension to the investigation of those conversions, some under extreme pressure — either to go to the baptismal fount, leave the land of your birth, or die; others voluntarily entered into. Though we have discussed this problem from time to time in the previous four chapters, it is now time to concentrate closely on the intellectual aspects of what is more than just a social, political and psychological business. Why should so many Jews, in 7

8 9

Moshe Halbertal, “The History of Halakhah, Views from Within: Three Medieval Approaches to Tradition and Controversy” (1994) online at http:www.law.harvard.edu/ programs/Gruss/halbert. Cited in Herz, New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews, p. 17. José Faur, The Horizontal Society: Understanding the Covenant and Alphabetic Judaism, 2 vols. (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2008). Because I have been privileged to work from Faur’s proofsheets and cannot always be accurate with page numbers, I will annotate my citations by Section and subsection numbers.

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some instances the religious and economic leaders of their community, in other instances whole congregations and communities, change from the ancestral faith to a new, seemingly utterly different kind of religion? Did this happen out of the blue in 1390 or had it been bubbling around under the surface for more than a century? To answer such questions, we must backtrack a little to ask three other, more subtle and difficult questions, somewhat like those asked before, but now with greater precision and subtlety, we hope: 1. Were the conversions uniform across all of Iberia in terms of geography, social class, or educational achievement or were they most prevalent in some regions more than others, among certain professions and kinds of families and not in others, and more often in the most assimilated groups susceptible to contemporary trends in philosophy, such as Averroism or Scholasticism? 2. Did all members of an extended family or community convert at once? What were the consequences of having spouses go in different directions, siblings separate, and close-knit extended families divide along new religious lines? 3. Did the voluntary converts do so for sincere religious or at least ideological reasons or for different modes of expediency, strategic protection of the whole family or community, or cynically out of Machiavellian motifs or even sheer greed? The answers can again be sketched out fairly quickly to begin with, but then we will have to look at a few points in much greater detail. 1. The conversions tended to appear in those regions and cities of Iberia where the followers of Nachmanides were in the majority, in old al-Andalus and Catalonia. It happened seemingly amongst the most educated and influential families, but not necessarily amongst the old elites and the current intimates of the royal courts. Often it was a rabbi, and then his congregation followed, stirred by the daring of his action or disillusioned and desperately seeking to find a new rock to hold on to in the sea of outrageous fortune. 2. There are instances where families seem to have delegated various roles to their members, not just as to who would convert, but also as to who would move to areas outside Spanish jurisdiction. In some instances, these families allied themselves with leading Christian clans, nobles themselves fearful of the rising middle classes in the city and the mob mentality that seemed to drive them to challenge the old authority of the feudal order and the stability of the Church. 3. Almost any reason you can adduce was possible and appears to have been used to explain or explain away the conversions. But two things do, nevertheless, appear to be certain in all this confusion: first, no single generalization, whether economic or political or even spiritual, can address the enormity of the problem and the extent of its ramifications over the face of the world and across nearly half a millennium in time. Second, if we keep 285

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asking the same old questions and using the same old concepts, we will not go anywhere new; which is why, from this point on in the book, the real questions have to do less with historicity and archival evidence than with midrashic investigations, constructions, and interpretations. Merely to ask these questions, however, has two other major faults. First of all, there is an assumption that Iberian Judaism — Sephardi religion and culture itself — was uniform and unchanging, at least for hundreds of years prior to the crisis period. Second, there is the further assumption that once a person or a group accepts baptism, that they are lost forever to Judaism, either because they sincerely seek to assimilate into the new religion and society, or because they are so disheartened, cut off from trusted friends and associates as well as learned authority figures, or subject to such intense monitoring that they dare not speak or act in such a way as to keep their Judaism alive. Yet neither of these two false assumptions can be easily swept aside or turned on their heads to rectify our research into the phenomena associated with the mass conversions. This would be to posit still another false assumption, namely, that history and the people who inhabit it are rational, and consequently make reasoned choices based on full or adequate data. Other questions force their way on to our attention. On the one hand, as we discussed already, was the Judaism of the Sephardim relatively harmonious and uniform prior to the crises inaugurated by the riots and pogroms of the 1390s? Or, which is now almost the same thing, did there already exist deep rifts between Jewish communities throughout Iberia, schools of thought that found themselves squared off in irreconcilable corners, and differing attitudes towards the surrounding Catholic states based on radically opposed concepts of culture, politics, and law? The answers are simple enough, once the historical data is re-examined and the rough edges smoothed out. On the other hand, because these were centuries that bridged the close of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of the Renaissance and so were filled to bursting with profound transformations in Iberian society in general and in Catholic doctrine and practice in particular — not least, the completion of the Reconquistà, and the beginnings of the Catholic Reaction or CounterReformation, — did Jewish community life and spiritual practice go through equivalent or at least analogous changes to adjust to these developments in the contextual, hegemonic culture? And were these changes merely social and political, or did they not rather dig deeply into the intellectual and affective roots of Judaism, creating — once again, as in all major crises that have beset the Children of Israel — the imagination, the mentality, and the intellectual strategies used to accommodate Jews into the world, the world that is actively hostile, terrifying and arrogantly obtuse? 286

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RAMBAM VS RAMBAN: WHO WON THE DEBATES? Maimonides was the last great figure found by the “golden age: of Andalusia. Nachmanides was the first great Spanish figure belonging totally to the cultural environment of Christian Europe. — Bernard Septimus10 Sectarianism sees the complex Jewish constituency narrowly. It finds its own identity by subtraction, exclusion, excommunication. Sectarianism is form of idolatry, the worship of a part as it were the whole. — Harold M. Schulweis11

For convenience sake, everything seems to turn on the two metonymic named categories: Rambam and Ramban. Maimonides — Rambam or Rabbi Moses ben Maimon — represents in his name and in his key writings the epitome of medieval Jewish rationalism and that form of religious practice that stands in opposition to the new developments in Sephardic Judaism that break down the former epistemology in Iberia based on high standards of scholarship, rabbinical integrity, and liberal openness to the science and philosophy of the surrounding non-Jewish civilizations. According to David Ramírez, who follows many of the same authorities we do, “Maimonides represents the last organic connection to Babylonian Sages and one who synthesized the works of the Geonim” and at the same time he “was the first and last one to codify all of Jewish Law based on careful examination of the entire received tradition.”12 Unlike Gersonides (1288– 1344), however, who was a follower of Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle, Maimonides “relied on Alfarabi and Avicenna,” an explanation, in part at least, of why the Rambam raised such controversy around himself amongst his coreligionists and yet seemed more amenable to Christian thinkers than almost any other Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages.13 The controversies that developed during the twelfth through fourteenth centuries around his stature as a standard of excellence, a set of debates and accusations brought about by opponents who cluster around the name and writings of Nachmanides — Ramban or 10

11

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Bernard Septimus, “’Open Rebuke and Concealed Love’: Nachmanides and the Andalusian Tradition” in Rabbis Moses Nachmanides (Rambam) : Exploration in his Religious and Literary Virtuosity, ed., I. Twersky (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1983) p. 11. Harold M. Schulweiss, “The Character of Halacha Entering the Twenty-First Century” (1993), excerpts from a keynote address to the Rabbinical Assembly Convention in Los Angeles on 22 March 1993, now online in the Rabbi Harold Schulweis Archives of Valley Beth Shalom Synagogue, California at http://www.vbs.org/rabbi/shulw/halach_bot. David Ramírez, “Sephardim: La rosa, la espina y abeja: Crosspollenization and Strength in Jewish Culture” Sephardic Heritsge Update (nd) p. 3. Buijis, “Introduction” Maimonides: Critical Essays, p. 13.

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Rabbi Moses ben Nachman — effectively tore apart the fabric of Sephardic culture, undermining its ability to withstand the increased wave of Christian persecutions, and led towards the collapse of social coherence through massive defections from 1390 well into the sixteenth century. In a certain sense, neither Rambam nor Ramban can be stretched on procrustean beds to force their ideas to show a simplistic pattern of opposites.14 It is mostly in their disciples and followers where the ideas of these two great rabbis swerve into a pattern of dichotomies. On the one hand, modern commentators like José Faur see the division as radically clear — Maimonides represents all that was good and traditional in Sephardic civilization, in regard to its scholarship, its political acumen, and its social adeptness in negotiating a favourable position for Jews in the Islamic and even the Christian world, whereas his nemesis, Nachmanides, stands for all that was weak and destructive of Sephardic culture in all its ramifications and led directly to the mass conversions in post-1390 Iberia, the failure of the religious institutions to withstand the persecutions that followed through the next two centuries, and the rendering of the returns to Judaism in the Diaspora tinged with false assumptions and misreading of the Law. On the other hand, other scholars, usually more favourable to the Ramban and the remythologized Judaism that developed out of the merging of Sephardic Kabbalah in Sefad with Ashkenazi pietism and pilpulism, ascribe the catastrophic events in Spain and Portugal to the social arrogance of the Maimonideans (though not necessarily to Rambam himself), to their seduction by Greek and Christian intellectual traditions, and to the misplaced political loyalties that verged on unprincipled Machiavellianism and cynicism. For that reason, we have to plunge into the midst of things to wrestle with the angelic details of their work. What we are concerned with, however, we must remind ourselves — the author of this book and the readers — that our concern is neither to argue the subtleties of theology nor even to discover the truth of the controversy, the choice of a winner in the eyes of the divine judge, or in the eyes of Jewish Law in which time and space dissolve into the omnipresent supervision of rationality; but rather to how the debate itself fractured the paradigms of social, political and cultural life among the Sephardic Jews, destabilized the mental and intellectual world in which they believed they had lived in relative peace and harmony with their neighbours Christian and Muslim and related to the Jews and non-Jews in the world outside of Iberia. What subsequently happened from 1390 onwards and the moral, political and cultural choices made because of those events, can only be understood in terms of that fractured existential reality. 14

To see how both Rambam and Ramban shift towards the centre in their attitudes towards folklore and magic, cp. David Bassous, “Superstition and Magic” online at http://home. earthlink.net/~etzhaim/halakha/Superstition (Seen 16/01/2007).

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THE APPARENT AND THE CONCEALED My object in adopting this arrangement is that the truths should be at one time apparent, and at another time concealed. Rambam15

We begin the discussion with a critique of a rather technical and specialized study by James Arthur Diamond of Maimonides’ hermeneutics in the Guide for the Perplexed.16 Diamond focuses “on how to decipher its elusive and enigmatic style” and suggests ways in which this method can be applied, not only to the Sacred Scriptures of Tanakh and Talmud but to other texts (including each of these two rabbis) and to cultural and historical events. This kind of programme in discourse analysis takes us beyond Leo Strauss’ discussions of how to interpret those central documents of western civilization that were written simultaneously on an exoteric (for the common reader) and inner secretive (for the initiated student) level. In particular, Diamond tracks down the Rambam’s method of citing or alluding to midrash in order to create “the allegorization of allegory.”17 The Guide for the Perplexed makes use of the rabbinical midrash, witty and poetical enhancement of biblical and homiletic passages, to explore those spiritual, moral and political issues that go beyond conventional wisdom; and because of this trespass of authority, Maimonides seeks to prevent casual or malicious misuse of his insights — and they are prophetic speculations with profound ramifications for the course of Jewish history. Simon Rawidowicz also aptly reminds us that what the rabbis were doing in midrashing the Holy Writings was more than a literary exercise: it was always a way of living through a crisis.18 It has already 15

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Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, translated from the Original Arabic Text by M. Friedlander. 2nd ed., revised throughout. (New York: Dover Publications, 1956; orig. 1881) p. 3. The Arabic title is Dalālat al-Hā’’irin and the Hebrew Moreh Nevukhim. James Arthur Diamond, Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment: Deciphering Scripture and Midrash in The Guide of the Perplexed (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002) p. 3. We choose to base this section on Diamond’s work rather than Leo Strauss’ important essay “The Literary Character of The Guide for the Perplexed” (in Salo Wittmayer Baron, ed., Essays on Maimonides: An Octocentennial Volume [New York: Columbia University Press, 1941] pp. 37–91) for a number of reasons, not least for the perverse manner in which we follow Rambam in taking “the road less travelled” and dispersing our key ideas in various chapters, hidden in footnotes, and spoken of in ironic and ambiguous ways, which, after all, is our honour to Strauss, anyway; but also because Diamond is much more recent and writes out of the terms and concepts of the early twenty-first century, even though he takes a different course than José Faur, whom we also find more amenable and accurate in his interpretations; and because Diamond’s arguments and explanations of midrash are actually more pertinent to main thrust of this book. Simon Rawidowicz, Studies in Jewish Thought, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974) p. 47.

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been indicated in earlier chapters of this book, following Neusner and Faur, that each major catastrophic shift in Jewish life was accompanied by a concomitant change in imagination (The Fall of the Temple, the collapse of the national state and its archival records, etc.); and it may also be that every generation of Jews feels that it may be the last,19 and is thus compelled by an anguish of soul to discover or rather re-discover the essential strategies of midrash and thus to construct new documents and institutions to accommodate to this transformation of mentality. “Interpretatio,” claims Rawidowicz, cheekily using a Latin term, that is, as Faur recalls from his Argentine childhood, the language of idolatry (i.e., the Church),20 assumes that there is a hidden layer both in form and content of the document to be interpreted . . . There is a mystery between the words and between the lines that which the document ought to have said and did not say, either because it could not say (for various reasons) or it did not want to say — this is what intrigues the interpreter, who will naturally dig into the hidden layers of the text.21

This is precisely what Maimonides was concerned with, although when he dealt with “the double-facedness of the inherited ‘text’ . . . the visible (zāhir) and the hidden (bātin),” he had to wrestle with the implications of what the new reading would be, to ensure that the ta’wil (interpretatio) “would conform to reason, truth, and the Bible.”22 The danger lay in derashot shel-dofi, “faulty exegeses,”23 or what we have called satanic midrashim. As Rambam foresaw, at least partly, these interpretative readings were to be manipulated by men in Spain whose knowledge, training and moral qualifications left much to be desired, with the result that many kabbalists claimed to be speculating in the tradition of Maimonides, while other wouldbe Talmudists tried to ride on his coat-tails to prove their rather dubious and dangerous misinterpretations. For this reason, the Rambam who knows all too well the vulnerability of Judaism in a hostile world, as a man whose family were forced to flee the forced conversions in Spain under an aggressive Muslim regime, and had seen how easily many of the Jewish intellectuals submitted to these pressures or were led astray by their own search for facile answers — for this reason, according to Diamond, the Rambam used “a consciously planned literary device of concealment designed to exclude unsophisticated readers and prevent them from discovering its use in the text.”24 Diamond thereby 19 20

21 22 23 24

Rawidowicz, Studies in Jewish Thought, p 197. José Faur, “Don Quixote: Talmudist and Muchos Más” The Review of Rabbinic Judaism: Ancient, Medieval and Modern 4:1 (2001) 139–157; online at betypsef.org (seen 4/4/2007). Rawidowicz, Studies in Jewish Thought, p. 48. Ibid, p. 63. Faur, “Don Quixote: Talmudist and Muchos Más” p. 143, n. 18. Diamond, Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment, p. 3.

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undertakes to show how the Guide “can utilize midrash and Scripture to further an argument or strengthen a proposition” and why it “can only be understood when several layers of camouflage are stripped away so as to reveal the ultimate core of meaning.”25 The sophisticated reader, he goes on to say, using a metaphor from economics now common in post-modern studies, “fashions a ‘surplus of meaning’ out of apparent semantic nonsense.”26 Following other scholars who have approached midrash with the supposed acumen of literary critics of the post-modernist persuasion,27 Diamond concludes that this genre of rabbinic exegesis works by a duality based on hidah, riddle, and mashal, fable or parable. The distinction had already been noted by David Kimhi before Maimonides extended the meanings for his own purposes: “A hadish is an obscure saying from which something else is to be understood, while a mashal is a likening of one matter to another . . . ”28 By such reasoning, the same lines of text can be or do both, and the figurative language can condense and foreshorten meanings simultaneously. Yet in ordinary circumstances, when a new line of thought has to be extracted from the seemingly innocent text, the enhanced or newly created meaning only reveals itself through the conventional reading of the passage obliquely as a hint or a pointer. For Maimonides, however, prophetic discourse will appear in a more coherent and extensive format when the wellinstructed reader learns to go beyond a specific context and sees how each word, as it flashes out, “attracts a network of allusions, definitions, and expositions that are scattered throughout the treatise.”29 Then, as a pattern begins to take shape in the reader’s mind, the original context dissolves and recreates itself as a larger matrix of signification: the screen upon which images were projected and which at first seemed to be a reality, as in Plato’s image of the cave from the Republic, becomes a rhetorical window or discursive glass, refracting and reflecting the flashes of light, and the surprised reader starts to glance through the latticed window.30 At first, then, the light is blinding and only signals that 25 26 27 28 29 30

Diamond, Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment, p. 4. Ibid, p. 11. Cp. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses, pp. 150ff. Diamond, Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment, p. 18. Ibid, p. 24. For an Ashkenazi perspective, see Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Peering through the Lattices”: Mystical, Magical, and Pietistic Dimensions in the Tosafist Period (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 20000). Kanarfogel discusses the relationship of local magical and folkloric traditions in northern France and the Rhineland, German Pietism (hasidei ashkenaz), and Sephardic Kabbalah, including anti-French and anti-Spanish tendencies. For a Christian perspective on this image, see Gisele de Nie, Views from a ManyWindowed Tower: Studies of Imagination in the Works of Gregory of Tours (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987). Of Gregory, the author says, “His thinking follows the laws of imagination rather than the logic of reason: images are not conceived of and thought about abstractly but are seen and related to each other through their visible form . . . This discontinuous, leaping ‘image-logic’, so long unrecognized because it exists alongside his practical

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what was thought to be reality is something else, something coming from behind or from within the places still unseen. Following this, the light becomes less overwhelming and there are vague shapes to be made out, as on a filigree work over shining gold, and the student, growing more accustomed to the sight, starts to recognize the shape of an object within. One might look to The Guide for the Perplexed to find this idea spelled out somewhat more clearly, at the same time “darkly,” thus allowing for the space of ambiguity31 where later disciples, albeit unknown to themselves, attempt to work out a way to live in a world where all the normative bearings of rabbinical discussion (malachot) have been cast aside: Know that for the human mind there are certain objects of perception which are within the scope of its nature and capacity; on the other hand, there are, amongst things which actually exist, certain objects which the mind can in no way and by no means grasp: the gates of perception are closed against it. Further, there are things of which the mind understands one part, but remains ignorant of the other; and when man is able to comprehend certain things, it does not follow that he must be able to comprehend everything. This also applies to the senses . . . 32

In a way that is at once rational and mystical, when these degrees of human limitation are accepted and when as a consequence the student applies the principles set out for reading the text of the world as well as the text of Holy Writings as set forth by the masters of the Law — that is, not those who impose fixed interpretations, but those who lead the naïve and the unsophisticated along the paths of understanding, above all, their own understanding within the boundaries of halachah33 — the outer layers of reality, with their illusions of time and space, of historical development and transformation, soon begin to give way to the new vision of divine simplicity, eternality and form beyond formlessness. Diamond further explains: At this stage it [the prophetic utterance] can either remain in abstraction or be filtered through the prophet’s imagination, which deciphers it into a publicly accessible format, usually of a highly graphic nature. The ensuing prophetic utterance then

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common sense and keen psychologizing insight, is responsible for Gregory’s creviced presentation” (p. 131). “God himself does not forbid doubt. He learns differing laws in the name of those who differ. He loves argumentation and discussion of the Law in the academy of heaven” (Rawidowicz, Studies in Jewish Thought, p. 130). Maimonides, The Guide, p. 40. “The same is the case with the true principles of science,” says Maimonides. “They were presented in enigmas, clad in riddles, and taught by all wise men in the most mysterious ways that could be devised, not because of some secret evil, or are contrary to the fundamental principles of the Law (as fools think who are only philosophers on their own eyes) but because of the incapacity of man to comprehend them at the beginning of his studies: only slight allusions have been made to them to serve for the guidance of those who are capable of understanding them” (The Guide, p. 44).

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communicates guidance on ethical or socio-political matters. Much of the audience will never surpass the external hyperbole. The majority may indeed discern the figurative language and cull the moral or political instruction that lies underneath. The task of the intellectual elite, however, is to sift through both those layers and retrieve the contents of the undiluted overflow vouchsafed to the rational faculty.34

Thus, according to Diamond, what the Rambam seeks to do is to move away from an analysis of the single utterance of a particular prophet and, instead, weave a subtle web of connective tissue of all prophecy, including those persons and events that do not at first or even second glance seem to be prophetic at all. Maimonides argues for an important connection between tselem, the statue or three-dimensional face, a term used for the sign of God, selem, a statue that represents at a distance, as platonic philosophy teaches, or across a divide of noncontiguous likeness, as we find in Christian mystics, and sulam, a ladder, a scale of increasing intellectual and spiritual understanding and insight. Word play on homonyms and association in the three-root system of Hebrew, as well as gamatria, that turns letters into numbers and thus equates words with the same numerical value, all work to break down or deconstruct the original surface textures of the prophetic or moral teaching and prepare for the reconstruction into an esoteric discourse. But it is not just play with words, as in pilpul, where contexts are dissolved and dismissed, but perceptions of things and images, too, are alluded to, connected by sounds and visual or numerical likenesses. Precisely by intercepting the normative, received meaning of passages in themselves or in their midrashic enhancements, Maimonides manoeuvres them into a set of new arguments that runs subversively beneath the surface of his own Guide for the Perplexed. This argument, so far as it goes, helps us to ground our discussion of what was going on in the minds and hearts — the souls, if you will — of those confused and yet determined Jews who, under the disguise of their Catholicism, joined the fellowship of the Penitentes. In a sense, they were reconfiguring their own images as Jews by playing with the already broken and hidden pieces of history hidden inside the beliefs and performances of these Christian penitents. Though obsessed by the need for secrecy35 — an obsession that grew as the generations passed and in the end overwhelmed the memories of what the secrets were and how they were to have functioned when the time of testing had passed — these men and women, by dint of their own determination, and bolstered by baroque adaptations of their actions and beliefs into the formulations of the Catholic brotherhood to which they also adhered and were protected by, midrashed their experiences into a situation wherein the painful shedding of blood seemed to resolve all contradictions. By collapsing the distance between an idolatrous service to a false Messiah and their own guilt-ridden need to atone for their sins 34 35

Diamond, Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment, p. 78. Alexy, The Marrano Legacy, Prologue, p. 2.

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and correct the errors of their forefathers, they created a superimposed text they could read out through actions rather than words. This substitution of actions for words, this plunge into the mythic sea of analphabetic experiences, will be discussed more fully in the last two chapters of this book. Once the Rambam has reinterpreted a text in one place, though, Diamond tells us, the meanings assigned to its constitutive words and images are to be found elsewhere in the Guide, without any specific authorial signal that this process is taking place. “Often,” writes Diamond, “silence and omission are as intrinsic to the exegesis as what is overtly argued in the text”36 and it is the reader who operates actively against the grain of the writer’s apparent innocence of subversive meaning. References to the blind and the deaf appear at key points in the text to remind the sophisticated student of his responsibilities in this regard.37 But as I have explained in discussions elsewhere of Chaucer’s handling of deafness — or at least the partial deafness — of the Wyf of Bath, one of his several most significant Marrano texts — the failure to hear and to understand is a key factor in the lost and confused soul of the anousim to reconnect with both the world they have lost due to conversion in their own or their family’s past and to assimilate into the world of the faith imposed by the status they have inherited against their will or at least without their prior consent. This may be explained too in terms of a cultural autism, a traumatic severing of social, spiritual and intellectual communications with the world of one’s existential reality. More than Rambam’s student’s perplexity, the Marranos on the Morada suffered “their own paranoid fear of exposure and continued commitment to hiding their true identities.”38 In fact, as we plan to discuss in the two last chapters to this book, the Maimonidean stress on Aristotle’s logic as a mainstay of Jewish understanding,39 albeit with several key modifications and adjustments, can be equally as valid for offering a way to understand the logic of the decision by Marranos to trek north to New Galicia in what is now the southwestern United States. Though a complex and somewhat speculative argument, it nevertheless provides us with a way of pulling together many otherwise loose strings. This kind of reading of the historical evidence and the current situation operates not so much between the lines, since very little of what actually occurred has 36 37

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Diamond, Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment, p. 148. On deafness and blindness as lading images of mysticism, see The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957). For their use in anti-Jewish homiletics and Jewish responses, see David Berger, Translation and Commentary, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996) pp. 11, 68, 216, 219. Alexy, The Marrano Legacy, Prologue, p. 2. Yehayah Leibowitz, The Faith of Maimonides, trans. John Glucker (New York: Adama Books, 1987) on the question of whether Maimonides should or could be considered a philosopher in the classical (that is, Aristotelian) or medieval (that is, Scholastic) sense, pp. 14–15.

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been recorded in official documents, let alone private letters or journals, but the interstitial space of human actions and productions — that is, it can be found in the distortions, gaps, and ambiguous traces left on the painful and humiliating experiences of peoples driven to secrecy and denial. Jewish tradition, from this perspective of close and subtle reading of the ancient books, can be thus seen to have a primary text that instructs the student reader in this process of concealment and reconstruction, not as a radical new departure away from scriptural and rabbinic precedents but rather as intrinsic to the whole enterprise, various as it may be in its cultural coverings. This would confirm Shmuel Trigano’s point that Marranism, as the distortion of Jewish cultic appearances, is not an exotic aberration but an essential element of Judaism itself from its earliest project of radical iconoclasm and concealment, that is, from Abraham’s rebellion against his father as a maker of idols to Esther’s role as saviour of her people by hiding her Jewish identity and living as the queen of Achashueros in the palace at Susa.40 These biblical texts provide the clues, the contexts and the secrets for the interpretation of the Crypto-Jewish embodiment of the Penitentes in their disciplinary rituals.

THE SACRED AND THE SECRET Wherever they settled, secret Jews have made a sacred ritual of warning each other to hide their ancestral identities, to remain invisible, to look over their shoulders at all times and be ready to defend themselves against the next inevitable assault. Trudi Alexy41 But when barbarians have deprived us of our possessions, put an end to our science and literature, and killed our wise men, we have become ignorant . . . We are mixed up with other nations; we have learnt their opinions, and followed their ways and acts. — Rambam42

It is not enough to consider Maimonides by himself in the kind of study we are doing. His relationship — and it is a complex one — to Nachmanides takes us 40

41 42

Shmuel Trigano, éd., Le Juif caché: Marranisme et modernité (Paris: InPress avec le concours du Centre National du Livre, 2000), especially the editor’s own two essays, “Le mystère d’Esther et de Joseph, la mystique politique du marranisme” (pp. 11–22) and “Le marranisme, un modèle multidimensionnel” (pp. 261–269). Alexy, The Marrano Legacy, Prologue, p. 10. Maimonides, The Guide, p. 168.

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into the historical dynamic that provides the matrix into which the changes to Sephardic mentality took place. This tension between Rambam and Ramban also allows us to understand the drive by many Jews in Iberia to convert to Christianity even before the period of great persecutions began in the 1390s and the reason why, as the crisis developed, it seemed impossible for a certain number of these people either to escape from the Lands of Idolatry and rejoin rabbinical communities across the Pyrenees and around the Mediterranean or to accept their fate, assimilate into Catholic beliefs and folkways, and so disappear as gracefully as possible over a very short period of time. David Shasha, argues for what he calls “The Levantine Option”43 in which modern Jewish thought seeks — or should seek out, in his view — its roots both back through the European sources to their origins in pre-1492 medieval rabbinic writings and at the peripheries, including the Sephardic base in Iberia, around the Mediterranean island and peninsula centres of Kabbalah and teaching of Maimonides and into the Arabic-speaking lands of the Near and Middle East. At his most extreme, Shasha claims that . . . it is a fact of Jewish history that the traditions of Sephardic Religious Humanism . . . were developed under and in concert with the Arabic civilization of the 43

See for example his “Introduction to This Week’s Newsletter: Isaac Newton and Judaism” Sephardic Heritage Update (11 February 2004) 2–3. The argument was spelled out more fully two years before in “A Jewish Voice Left Silent: Trying to Articulate ‘The Levantine Option”, though originally meant for The New York Times which refused to publish it, is available as background material for “Jews for Justice for Palestinians” available online at http://www.jfjp.org/backgroundU/shasha. In his many recent essays, Shasha sometimes seem to suggest that all Zionists are Ashkenazi Jews and all Ashkenazi are Germans and stigmatized them as extremist Orthodox obscurantists and thus the very opposite of the Arab Jews and other Sephardim. See for instance his “Blindness and Light: Typologies of Self-Love and Self-Hate in the Sephardi Community” Sephardic Heritage Update (15 September 2004) 4–10. While there clearly are persecutory and obscurantist tendencies in some of the Ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel and the Diaspora, not only, by his own admission, do they include Sephardic and Arab Jews who have adopted Ashkenazi haredism as their own, but they are all not German. Moreover, not all Central and East European Jews and their descendants affiliate with Orthodox synagogues and yeshivot. In America, most children of Yiddish-speaking parents or grandparents are either part of the Conservative or Liberal/Reformed/Progressive movements or non-affiliated at all. Even in Israel, probably 60% of the Ashkenazi Jews do not attend synagogue in any regular fashion precisely because they identify “religion” or “Judaism” with the black hats and sheytles. What this brilliant scholar sees as narrow-minded, superstitious and hostile to pluralist modernism is certainly around, and variations have been around for a long time: you don’t lock people in ghettoes, subject them to pogroms, and seek to annihilate them totally without a traumatic effect — but each period of persecutions also produced liberalizing, universalizing, and other tendencies to adjust Judaism to the emergent democratic and enlightened nations of Europe and North America by absorbing many though not all ideas, by contributing new ideas and practices to the general society, and by transforming Judaism in a dynamic manner.

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High Middle Ages. This Religious Humanism, which can be studied in the works of Maimonides, Bahye ibn Paquda, Se’adya Ga’on, Moses ibn Ezra and many others, was formally BANNED by the Ashkenazim; within the Ashkenazi Jewish culture there was a desperate attempt to close ALL Jews off from any and all outside currents of thought and culture.44

In addition, continuing this assault on an Ashkenazi construct set up as the mirrored reverse of Sephardic religious humanism, he asserts: This Ashkenazi suppression of Sephardic Humanism was not committed in the breach, but was based on centuries of Ashkenazi Talmudic tradition which might be characterized along the lines of the PILPUL method developed in Franco-German school of Tosafot.

Shasha rightly describes pilpul as “a debilitating form of discourse that rarely if ever adopts a rational posture,” but he condenses and distorts the history of West and East European Judaism to reduce everything to a closed system of such empty ratiocination. Ironically, at the same time, the world of Yiddeshkeyt is also smeared by the charge of superstitious Kabbalah, as though the Mitnagim (guardians of halachic tradition) and Hassidim (dynastic pietists) were not at each other’s necks for close to three centuries before they reached some sort of strange alliance of nationalist mysticism in Israel, while the whole role of the Maskallim or Enlightened thinkers is left out. Before the massacres of the first two crusades, Jews in Western Europe tended to live in the midst of Christian culture with varying degrees of toleration and cooperation, although not with the same relative degree of conviviality evident in Iberia among the three Abrahamic faiths. After those persecutions, refugees either moved south for refuge in Iberia or travelled to the east where they were welcomed in the new Christian kingdoms of Poland and Hungary. Though highly traumatized by persecution and expulsion, these Ashkenazim did not all easily adopt the textual structures of Rashi’s grandsons, the socalled Tosafists, with their stress on pilpul. It would be misleading to read back conditions in nineteenth-century shtetlech in the Czarist or Austro-Hungarian Empires to the late Middle Ages or early Modern Period. Meanwhile, in Spain, scholars from both Hebrew and Latin traditions often worked together to translate and comment upon the Arab inheritance of Greek civilization. Jews moved relatively freely across the boundaries of Christian and Islamic culture and attempted to participate in various ways in both. Faur suggests that, while Islam was more open in this way than Christendom, each marking “two modes of religious thinking,” it was “in the pluralistic society of Andalusia” that the 44

David Shasha, Introductory notes to the circulation of a letter by Nadia Matar, “What is Really Shocking, and Who is Really Inciting?” emailed by the author on davidshasha@ aol.com (27 September 2004).

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Maimonidean tradition originated and flourished.45 Yet we have to remember that the family of the Rambam were forced to flee Muslim persecution in their native Spain and probably forcibly converted before they found refuge in North Africa; so that we don’t overly idealize the place of Jews under various Islamic governments. Unlike either of the other two monotheisms, which depended on ijtihad, “personal endeavour” that includes “pious impulse” and “religious zeal,” Judaism emerges from the rational study of precise laws in order to understand and carry out the bilateral covenant with God.46 “Indeed,” writes José Faur, “were one to accept personal endeavour as a spiritual criterion, there would be no distinction between heathenism, magic and any other religious creed.”47 Opposition to Maimonides in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries “represented a Jewish absorption of Christian thought patterns”48 and this had an increasing deleterious effect on traditional Jewish values and concepts of the relationship between human beings and God. But those David Shasha calls “Ashkenazim” are to a great extent not just individual rabbis who do not represent for all time the whole of Central and East-European Jewry, since to a great extent they are the individuals who lived in the coastal provinces of France and Catalonia; however, as Faur points out, those same Sephardic rabbis justified their novel innovations in irrational mysticism, charismatic leadership, and visionary scholarship by speaking in the name of imaginary French Rabbis — but never actually naming them or giving their sources. This indeterminate and authoritative group of men called “The French Rabbis” probably did not live or write, except in the imaginations of the kabbalists and charismatics of Iberia. Though there actually were a few refugee rabbis from the Rhineland who sought sanctuary from the troubles in German-speaking lands and who for their own reasons chose not to migrate into the kingdoms of Poland and Hungary, for the most part the authorities who were supposed to legitimize the innovations of the new Spanish Kabbalah never existed. The innovations moreover were not random ideas and fragmentary adjustments to traditional Sephardic culture which had been based on the rational interpretation of the Law and the highly scholarly standards of the Babylonian academies, but were profoundly disturbed patterns of thought and feeling. What those thought patterns were that José Faur speaks of can be found outlined in his essay on “Anti-Maimonidean Demons.”49 45

46 47 48 49

José Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992) p. 10. Ibid, pp. 10–11. Ibid, p. 11. Ibid, pp. 12–13. José Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 6:1 (2003) 1–52.

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The anti-Maimonidean movement was the effect of assimilation [of Jewish intellectuals in parts of Spain and southern France from the eleventh century onwards] to Christian patterns of thought and feeling, whereby the persecuted adopts the spiritual and psychological apparatus of the persecutor . . . A mark of the anti-Maimonidean ideology (whereby zeal displaces halakhah) is the sanction of violence as a legitimate means for the implementation of “religion.”50

The violence is both physical, as indicated by Faur in instances where rabbis behaved cruelly and irrationally towards their enemies, and metaphoric in their extravagant language towards their opponents they labelled heretics, traitors, and ignoramuses. In an extreme form, the contention can be seen as one between rationalists versus anti-rationalists. On the one hand, as Harvey Hames points out, “The increased study of Aristotle combined with the towering presence of Maimonides (d. 1204), meant that Rabbis and intellectuals were trying to rationalise their faith, re-examining central existential questions such as the relationship between the Creator and creation, God and man, and the reasoning behind the performance of the commandments.”51 On the other hand, the anti-rationalists argued that rationalism in and of itself distorted the nature of Judaism, and they preferred a Platonic or Neo-Platonist approach, particularly as filtered through the Kabbalah, and stressed the sanctity of aggadic discourses, both the older rabbinical figurative and homiletic texts and the newer, more mythic mystical depictions of the secret, hidden miracles and mysteries of God and creation. In some significant ways, too, the intellectual argument was also political and aesthetic, representing new responses to the weakening of the Andalusian tradition in Spain, the increased influence of northern French Tosafist rabbinics and the shifting relationship of Jewish philosophical and poetic thought from Islamic to Christian cultures, just as it had shifted earlier from Aristotelianism to Platonism in the crisis period when the Roman Empire had become Christianized, thus granting political power, legal privileges and moral authority to this “New Israel” both in what was to be from thenceforward known as Palestine and in all parts of the Empire, including the Sacred City of Rome itself. Jacob Neusner follows these shifts of power, influence and authority in the revisionary documents of post-Temple Judaism, e.g., from the Mishnah to the Talmud of Jerusalem, as well as in Midrashim, Sifre and related books. Isidore Twersky argues that the Ramban was able to achieve a synthesis of the Tosafists and Spanish Talmudism that for a brief moment also balanced the Maimonides’ rationalism with the new Kabbalah.52 Unfortunately, not only were 50 51

52

Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” 3. Harvey Hames, “‘Quia nolunt dimittere credere pro credere, sed credere per intelligere’: Ramon Lull and his Jewish Contemporaries” online at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/ Forum/5284/sanpaulo2001. Isidore Twersky, “ Introduction”, Rabbi Moses Nachmanides (Rambam), ed. Twersky (pp. 5–6).

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Nachmanides’ followers unable or unwilling to sustain either the synthesis or the balance, but he himself tended to misread the Rambam to hold his thoughts together. But while the Ramban thought of himself as seeking an accommodation with the rationalists, many of the more extreme anti-Maimonideans had no compunction about calling on Christian authorities to threaten or punish their rivals to their self-proclaimed authority, and this led to disruptions and further insecurity, and eventually to persecutions and massacres inside the Jewish communities affected. The Christian patterns of thought specifically refer to those methods of approaching faith, law, revelation, debate and the decisions of rabbinical courts. Though the situation would become more radically diverted to charismatic ecstasy after Nachmanides’ death, as it was already becoming before then in the Mediterranean cities of south-western France, the reason cannot be explained quite as simply as some would have it. Meanwhile, Bernard Septimus argues that it is not a straightforward set of dichotomies: “reason and faith, thought and feeling, philosophy and mysticism.”53 Nor can it be explained merely as Judaism influenced by Islam versus Judaism influenced by Christianity. Septimus further points out, for instance, thirteenthcentury Spanish anti-rationalism was not simply a northern European import; it had roots in the Gaonic and Andalusian traditions.”54 It is after all from the creative genius of Sephardic Jews in northern Spain and southern France that the explosion of kabbalistic texts comes. If there are Neo-Platonist, Pythagorean Gnostic and other ancient roots to this kind of occult thinking, it is possible to see the ingestion and digestion of such mystical ideas as part of a larger process by which Judaism in Europe opens itself to classical influences; it can be taken, in other words, as a complement to the Graeco-Arab synthesis that David Shasha celebrates. If Judaism also came under the spell of Catholic Christianity as the Reconquista moved apace in Iberia and other parts of the Mediterranean coast, the enchantment was not all detrimental to Jewish traditions.55 Already Islamic culture in the eastern Mediterranean was in decline and in the west the wonderful synthesis of a mythic al-Andalus was quickly fading from memory — though this memory today can often be taken in too romanticized a way, when, as Septimus remarks, it had a complexity that belies simplistic visions of perfect conviviencia or creative tolerance56 — and in its place, along with superstitious and persecuting aspects of Catholic hegemony there was the development of Scholasticism, as well as the emergence of troubadour lyri53 54 55

56

Septimus, “Open Rebuke,” p. 11. Ibid p. 16. The topic is something to be discussed in the last two chapters of this book. This statement anticipates a startling conclusion we have come to. Septimus, “Open Rebuke,” p. 15. As we can see in Shasha’s “Levantine Option,” the dream has potent political implications.

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cism, romantic idealism, and glimpses of humanism in what long ago Charles Hoskings called the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. The myths and images of the Zohar and other works of Sephardic mysticism are much more than secondrate copies of Christian superstition or visionary dreams; they are exciting, creative new ways to imagine the self, the world, and the spiritual universe, ways which usually return to the Tanakh and rabbinical writings for inspiration and return for validation. Insofar as Kabbalah acts as a supplement to halachic discussion and behaviour, it expands the reach of Jewish speculative philosophy. If it closes in on itself later, as textual criticism folds down into mere pilpul, the problem is not in the enterprise of mysticism itself, no more than in Talmudic argumentation when it becomes mere casuistry. The problem lies in a loss of balance in the controversies, not a simplistic replacement of one kind of tradition by another. Each side in the Maimonidean controversy backed off into defensive postures, feeling that the other’s extremism was a threat to what they believed was the core of Jewish life and learning, and each side felt it had to protect Judaism from the increasing strength of the non-Jewish world they lived in. Particularly, Nachmanides and others forced into public debates to defend the Talmud and its use of aggadic exemplars found a strict rationalist mode of allegory weakened the emotional and spiritual dimensions of the faith. To rationalize away the midrashic aspects of rabbinic tradition would be to expose Jews to even greater onslaughts by both the scholastic spokesmen of the Church and the popular cults of sacraments and saints. They feared that if Judaism transformed into an Aristotelian philosophy of ethics and law and lost its supernatural or mysterious force, it would be unable to sustain the faith of the people in times of extreme stress. But the Maimonidean camp, then as now, feared that any softening of intellectual debate and legal discourse would see Judaism collapse into an indefensible charismatic occult and spiritualist mess, either as a superficial copy of Christian superstitions or a worse hodgepodge of Neo-Platonist and Gnostic myths. Ironically, it seems, the Ramban himself is closer to the Andalusian ideal of openness and liberal humanism than the version of Maimonides set up as his opposite as the symbol of talmudic rationality. It is also tragically ironic that what began to appear in the Catalonian cities of Gerona and Perpignan with Nachmanides and his circle of disciples offering so much poetic insight and psychological creativity, tended to become, almost in the twinkling of an eye, lost in the same narrowness that seemed to darken the colourful courtly life of Iberia under centralized Catholic rule.57 What is ironic is that the Maimonidean Controversy (or all three of them) itself creates much of this repressive dampening, as though poetic expression and other reflexive 57

Ezra Fleischer, “The ‘Gerona School’ of Hebrew Poetry” in Twersky, Rabbi Moses Nachmanides, pp. 35–49.

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individualizing tendencies were contrary to any kind of Judaism. As Fleischer puts it, thereafter “[n]either of them needed poetry . . . ”58 But as Faur and others argue, it is not just a matter of taking the poetry out of life that is stultifying for Judaism, but rather the tendency to lose touch with the learning and respect for rational argumentation that reduces European Jewish culture’s ability to stand up against the Christian onslaught — and hence to increasingly retire into one form or another of obscurantism, whether kabbalistic superstitions or pilpul. On the other hand, it does not seem to me that all the life went out of the rabbinical imagination in the West or in the East. In fact, as so often in the past, when Judaism faced great crises that loomed up as though to extinguish all of Judaism, the community has responded with creative innovations of a profound nature: take the Destruction of the Temple and the razing of Jerusalem, events that forced rabbis to initiate vast mythic changes in their thought to compensate and recreate a Judaism that could survive without its cult of sacrifices, the priests that administer those services, the loss of the morasha or national archives, the collapse of the state and hence of national institutions; or a few hundred years later, the rise of Christianity, not just as a rival religion claiming to be the New Israel and re-inventing the Tanakh as an Old Testament, but as an imperial power following Constantine’s deathbed vision and conversion, thus removing virtually all remaining legal and judicial rights of Jewry. Certainly, Judaism survived, but not the Hebrew religion of the Temple or of the Bible alone. Mishnah, two Talmuds, Midrashim and a score of other rabbinical discourses appeared, and the rabbinic Judaism that was created survived the long dark agony of the Middle Ages, with its persecutions, expulsions, and massacres. My argument is that the Maimononidean Controversy was not merely a symptom of a malaise or a weakness in the heart of Iberian Judaism, but a stirring of intellectual excitement and religious revolution. Some of the consequences were positive, some were negative, but all was, as the sages said, “for the sake of heaven.” So too the aftermath of the Cossack Uprising in the mid-seventeenth century led to the debacle of Shabbati Tzvi, to be sure, but not only was this followed by three surges of religious creativity — the consolidation of mitnagid conservatism, the establishment of quietist and dynastic Hasidismus, and the development of Haskallah and a Yiddish drive towards secularism59 — but also by an increasing 58 59

Fleischer, “The ‘Gerona School’, ” p. 48. For the most part, these three streams of Ashkenazi modernity — the strong retreat into traditional scholarship divorced from social engagement, the mystical fervour of closed dynastic communities, and the foray into assimilation and near secularism — did not determine the course of Sephardi history until very late in the nineteenth century. Beginning with the creation of the Alliance Israëlite that set up schools in the Turkish Empire and North Africa luring Sephardim to move into French civilization and continuing through the upheavals of World Wars I and II and the establishment of the

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engagement by Jews and Judaism with the Protestant powers rather than only with the European Catholic monarchies and the Eastern Orthodox tyrannies. Just as the disaster in Iberia of mass conversions and expulsions led to a vast change in the configuration of Jewish demographics, with the unexpected and often under-estimated consequences of so many hundreds of thousands of Jews having been brought up and educated as at least nominal Christians before their return to Judaism outside of the Peninsula, so too we have to see that the churbanim (disasters) of the seventeenth century also brought new opportunities and stimuli in their wake. The Shabbataian fiasco was one extreme of response that went bad, but other decisions, choices, and traumatic reactions were not as insane or dead-ended. The history of the Marranos in the land of the Penitentes stands somewhere ambiguously in this same line of response to the crises of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In our last chapters, we will explore the implications more closely. So many Sephardim returning to the ancestral Mosaic faith needed to relearn their Judaism — and to learn it in new critical and sometimes sceptical perspectives — that the clamour for introductory Hebrew education led to the reorganization of rabbinic education and modes of community control. If that were not bad enough, when the false messianic hopes went up in smoke, many disillusioned followers of Shabbatai Tzvi, whose fervent faith in the principles of Jewish mythology, mysticism, and argumentation was dashed, new options opened up. Their Jewish consciousness had to be reconstructed with further codification of legal compendia, re-editing of prayer books and liturgical practice, and rethinking of protocols of engagement with surrounding Christian societies. In other words, Jewish history is a series of catastrophes and revivals, disappointments and anticipations of messianic ecstasy, forgetting and remembering, learning, unlearning and relearning. In this messy mass of morose history, the Children of Israel have wandered in the desert, wrestled with the angel until dawn, and sat down by the river and wept for a lost but not forgotten Jerusalem. In his analysis of late medieval and early modern documents during the several waves of so-called Maimonidean controversies that swept across south-western Europe like a tsunami, José Faur sees a tendency for Iberian Jewish scholars to adapt to deviant norms developed earlier in northern and central European communities in traumatic response to the Crusades and the persecutions that followed. To a certain, even an important degree, Faur is correct, but this is not the whole story. Hames avers, “The Kabbalistic movement was not just an esoteric doctrine restricted to an elite, but an alternative religious State of Israel, steadily the influences were felt in terms of language choice, liturgical customs used, and institutional structures, so that today, not completely, of course, but in an increasing way, the two great branches of Jewishness are coming together.

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system that sought to engage with the wider community providing the Jewish teaching with new content.” This new mythical content60 is quite radical, to be sure, but not as new as the opponents would have it — as though, for example, Moshe de Leon wrote the Zohar from whole cloth out of his own demented brain, and not as a powerfully creative poetic midrash on existing mystical tendencies going at least back into late Antiquity; moreover, as students of Nachmanides often point out, the effort was often to balance the rationalism of Maimonides and the philological precision of northern French approaches with a dynamic spirituality and poetic inventiveness. Where Faur correctly (in my view) sees long-term problems arising is in the most fanatical extremism of the anti-rationalist approach of the Ramban, with its mentally and logically unbalanced antinomian views: its failure to maintain high standards of linguistic training, its indiscriminate lapse into idolatrous literalism in regard to aggadah and mystical flights of fancy, and, perhaps worst of all, its attack on traditional rabbinic intellectual authority. Faur thus writes: Traditionally, Rabbinic scholarship focused on what was said. In the footsteps of the scholastics, the anti-Maimonidean concern is on who said this or that about the text, thus degenerating into a hierarchical [feudal] system of auctores majores ad minores.61

This alien approach to decision-making about Jewish Law created a situation in which certain individuals and families claimed inerrant status as sources of authority, with a further slide towards dependence on magic, visions, and other irrational and trance-like activities: all of this was further exacerbated, according to Faur, by a combination of lack of education in philology, grammar, rhetoric, logic and hermeneutics, an ignorance of classical science and philosophy, and a dependence upon “faulty texts, flawed readings, and unfamiliarity with Gaonic scholarship.”62 This travesty of Jewish law and tradition creates what Faur calls “the axis ‘French Rabbis’ → ‘Qabbala’. ”63 In this paradigm, the designation French Rabbis refers to a small group of men claiming hegemonic religious authority over, more than just the regions of Provence or Catalonia, but “over all Israel.” And this power to know and rule in all matters of Jewish Law derived, not from communal recognition and institutional agreement with their proved knowledge in Talmud and other facets of rabbinical learning, but on supernatural 60

61 62 63

By mythical here we mean more than just traditional narratives about first things that lay down the paradigms of moral and ethical behaviour or establish the natural laws of the universe, but rather explanations of historical and political events based on visionary or poetic images, dramatic or spectacular incidents, and other non-rational discourses. Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” 8, n. 25. Ibid, 10–11. Ibid, 12.

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insights that are often antinomian and drawn from Christian doctrines. The transformed cultural matrix in which Judaism found itself was not merely that Catholic princes and bishops had replaced Muslim rulers and imams, or that Iberian Jewish intellectuals had to learn a whole new repertoire of defensive apologetics in order to monitor their own capacity to sustain faith and zeal — or even further that the less-educated members of the community were vulnerable to missionizing activity. After all, the leaders of Sephardic Judaism were able to hold their own in social, political and intellectual milieu they shared with the dominant Catholic regime. The rabbinical leadership of Sepharad were not unaware of Greek knowledge, as happened later in Eastern Europe during the final stages of formative Ashhkenazic Judaism. Moreover, when it came to voluntary conversions, it was more often the educated elites, rabbis included, who were in the vanguard, not the uneducated, ordinary Jews. No, those three provisos are insufficient to explain the crisis. The rabbis on behalf of their communities now had to confront a Church which was learning rapidly, albeit not always accurately or fairly, how to challenge Judaism from the Talmud as well as the Bible. But to add insult to injury, many of the most rabid polemicists posing this challenge were renegade Jews, or rather educated rabbis. Hitherto, Hames points out, “As long as they could provide reasonable and alternative readings, their Jewish identities and beliefs were not in too much danger of being compromised.” But now with the Church armed with an intimate knowledge of Talmudic discourses and with former-rabbis leading the debates, the controversy aimed at the weakest points in Jewish apologetics, that is, where the Jewish intellectuals themselves were in contention over aggadah’s authority, over the anthropomorphism in biblical and talmudic texts, and over the evaluation of halachic logic. Each side in the so-called Maimonidean controversies therefore tended to see the other as colluding with the enemy, as it were, to destroy the core of the religion. These differences continued when the debates seem to die down and even when the period of persecutions and forced conversions began. Concessions, compromises and cooperation seemed out of the question at either extreme in the Sephardic communities facing this extended crisis. Though tempted by the lure of release from persecution and an opportunity to assimilate into the hegemonic society, New Christians increasingly felt uncomfortable with the dogmatic preaching of the priests or the orgiastic worship of the saints, the real stumbling block was the public reading of Scripture in Church. Why? (1) Because there was always a danger in misreading when the mediated understanding of rabbinical discourse is stripped away or disappears from memory, as when new generations are born and cannot be educated in traditional ways. (2) Because, more particularly, when Scriptures are read in the Vulgate translation that process filters the Hebrew concepts through a Christian sieve. Thus when the guided process from miqra to pshat no longer operates, as 305

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the Rambam put it succinctly: “The literal meaning of the words might lead us to conceive corrupt ideas and to form false opinions about God, or even entirely abandon and reject the principles of our Faith.”64 Further, Faur describes the axis which connects these postulated Great French Rabbis to “Qabbala” in terms of a newly developed mysticism focused on these anti-Maimonideans’ own experiences and fantasies. Unlike other modes of ancient Jewish mysticism, traditionally known as sod or esoterics,65 which functioned as a minor concomitant of mainstream traditions and provided a non-intrusive means of accommodating daily life to the superstitions and folkcustoms of the peoples amongst whom Jews found themselves, this newfangled Qabbala claimed to be the supreme theology of Israel, sometimes equal to and sometimes superior to Tanakh and Mishnah, and providing spiritual support to the mythical French Rabbis’ assertion of authority in and over the Law.66 In fact, what Faur argues is that the entire anti-Maimonidean movement was nothing less than a dolorous ruse “designed to discredit the standard interpretations of Judaism, in order to promote their own brand of theological mysticism . . . ”67 It was moreover a theology that deliberately turned away from the philosophies and scientific discourses that had been developed within the Gaonic tradition, that is, the Judaism centred on the great academies of Babylonia before the Islamic invasions, and within El Andalus or “Old Sepharad.”68 Granted that the end results of this deviation from intensive study and rationalistic discourse is the Shabbatean crisis of the seventeenth century and the steady increase of Hassidic enthusiasm from the eighteenth century onwards — , or we can try to find a Judaism that remains true to its Scriptural roots and yet can flower into brilliant poetry in each new season. More to the point of this book: were the Marrano intellectuals who travelled to the north of old Mexico and threw in their lot with the Penitentes at least partly correct in their hopes — if not in their assessment — of an eventual reaffirmation of all that was best in the Sephardic concept of the Law? It is important to keep in mind that while rabbinical Judaism in its Sephardic form was less a religion of faith and dogma than it was of law and rational debate; yet it was also a religion of faith, ritual, and mystical ideals. As much as these Spanish rabbis may have been influenced by and absorbed ideas, images, and practices from surrounding Islamic or Christian cultures, there nevertheless remained essential qualities distinguishing Jewish belief from those of the two other monotheisms, not least of which is the participatory, active, 64 65 66 67 68

Maimonides, The Guide, p. 211. Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” 14, n. 47. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid, 16.

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and historical role of individuals and the House of Israel in the historical, moral, social, and spiritual running of both this world of creation and the world to come of divine rule. While God, at the very least, is a logical necessity for the authority of the Law, its interpretation and influence on human affairs was seen to depend on human study and debate, the role of the divine made subordinate and in some ways dependent upon the decisions of the rabbinical community. Further, for these Jews, the Messiah was not only still to come and to appear as a human rather than a divine being, but that very anticipated coming of mosheach depended upon active Jewish repentance — not on God’s mysterious will imposing itself on a passive, sinful people. The creative, legal, and historical participation of human beings shockingly took Judaism outside the categories of Christian theology.69 In a sense, as this anti-Ashkenazi version of the argument between Rambamism and Rambanism seems to go, by the fatal last decade of the fifteenth century, Iberian Jewry, then rich and powerful, as well as dominant in terms of population, disintegrated in three directions: (1) those who lost faith in their own Jewish roots, often already corrupted by the Averroist temptations of Greek pagan philosophy, converted and disappeared into the Catholicism of Spain and Portugal; (2) those who were traumatized by the seemingly endless persecutions and propagandizing of the Church and gave up their own heritage for an ersatz Judaism increasingly shaped by the irrationalist tendencies of sacramentalism, Catholic icon-idol “worship,” and bizarre neoplatonic and gnostic mythologies; and (3) those who maintained their faith and cultural heritage and went into exile in the circum Mediterranean world, often linking up with or coming to dominate existing Jewish communities, and so able to evolve into the rich blend of Sephardic and Arabic Judaism that can be defined by Gaonic and Spanish intellectualism. The several phases of the so-called Maimonidean controversy suggests that something fundamental was changing during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Judaism in the Iberian states and the cities and principalities along the Mediterranean coast of what is now France.70 Whether these changes would have occurred without the specific roles of Maimonides and Nachmanides is moot; certainly the sides drawn up roughly behind Rambam 69

70

Suzanne Last Stone, “The Emergence of Jewish Law in Postmodernist Legal Theory” (1994) online at http://www.juedisches-recht.org/miller/harvard/Postmodernist-LegalTheory. Stone cites Faur in this section of the paper as one of her authorities. Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “The Maimonidean Controversy” Encyclopedia Judaica online at http://www.merkaz. com/maimoncontro. See also Elka Klein, “The First Maimonidean Controversy: a Summary” online at http://www.nyu.edu/classes/kleim/maimcont.

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and Ramban provide a convenient way to begin measuring the nature, extent and impact of these political, social, and intellectual shifts. Yet the controversies cannot be reduced to a simple contest between those real Spanish spiritual leaders and the illusory Great French Rabbis. The followers of the Rambam, fearful of run-away allegorization at the expense of adherence to the halachic code and the performance of mitzvoth in traditional terms, were unable to garner sufficient social and political power to protect the hedge around the Law. Those followers of Ramban who saw in the Rambam a challenge to their self-proclaimed visionary powers and who came to depended on arbitrary authoritarianism rather than rationalism, cooperated with the Christian elites — royal and ecclesiastical — to ensure that they stayed in charge of the Jewish communities; and, in so doing, undermined the moral and intellectual structures of those rabbinical institutions. While there were, to be sure, some moderates on both sides who sought to temper the debates, the controversy was exploited by the enemies of Israel and too many leading rabbis, caught in the heat and panic of the times, made what can only be viewed today as mistakes of judgment. As a result, when Jews in Spain during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were put to the test, large numbers gave in to conversion, either lacking the arguments to sustain their own faith, accepting the promises of a better life as New Christians in a modernizing society where religious affiliation would be a relatively relaxed affair, or believing they could make a strategic move for the moment and then return to Judaism. The rise of Islam had begun to alter the way in which European Jews perceived their relationship to one another and to the cultures around them, and the violent disruptions and dislocations brought on by the Crusades and the increasing strength of Christianity in Iberia and Central Europe altered the legal and political stability of Jewish communities on the Continent. Almost at the same time, the development of Scholastic philosophy and the establishment of universities and preaching orders signalled changes in the intellectual atmosphere surrounding Jews, even as they themselves were often instrumental in transferring classical ideas and attitudes from the Near and Middle East to Western Europe. To a great extent, Jews, who were not yet confined to ghettos nor withdrawn into self-imposed isolation from the cultures around them, participated in the generation of new ideas and ways of thinking about their relationship to the natural, political and spiritual worlds. In many, if not most instances, the same individuals who debated and wrote commentaries about traditional rabbinical books were also the translators of Greek science from Arabic, the practicing physicians and pharmacists who advanced European learning, the polemicists debating with their Christian (often converted) counterparts, and the most innovative figures in manufacturing and commerce. 308

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Some romantic historians suggest that the whole mood of Jewish life changed almost suddenly when the Reconquista speeded up in Iberia. Judaism, they argue, under a benign Islamic hegemony flourished as an intellectual and spiritual religion, learning from and influencing the Arabs in their absorption and development of ancient Greek civilization, but when changes in the political dominance of one group of Muslims gave way to others with less concern for culture and intellectual refinements, on the one hand, and when Christian princes regained or took over territories in Iberia and North Africa, the Jews — or at least the Jewish intellectuals — lacked the inner emotional strength to sustain their independence. Faur too, though in a less idealistic vein, hints at this radical and tragic shift when he speaks of Judaism in Spain assimilating Christian patterns of thought and feeling which were alien to the rabbinical culture and detrimental to Jewish concepts of learning and jurisprudence. Unlike Islam, which seemed more compatible with Judaism and encouraged rabbis to engage with them and their Greek sources in the formulation of social and intellectual, as well as spiritual ideas, Christianity in Spain became more hostile, its tolerance deceptive and pernicious in its effect, which was to impose such conditions that Jewish learning was compromised and self-images were almost psychotically reflected from anti-Semitic stereotypes. To fit into the Catholic civilization around them, many — not all — Jews conformed, perhaps mostly in an unconscious way, to the models around them in regard to what was the correct understanding of Scripture as a source of revelation, of exegesis as a way into spiritual life, and of prayer as an act of self-abasement and passive piety. To a degree, moreover, the relative peacefulness and harmony of Spain’s Golden Age, the ideal of al-Andalus, in the light of subsequent events, such as mass conversions and expulsions, was disastrous for Jewish integrity. The absence of resistance to assimilation into the mainstream of Iberian life, with success in social and financial terms for many ambitious Sephardic families, led to laxness in concerns for the uniqueness of Judaism in regard to Islam but above all to Christianity. “Since in Judaism theology is implicit rather than explicit,” Faur explains, “the submission of halakhah to theology means surrendering the Law to whatever nonsensical ‘explanation’ is supplied,”71 and when too many people, including those who ought by their offices to know better, do not know how to read or reason correctly, and moreover are unable to have access to all the texts and commentaries necessary, it is easier to find magical, emotional, irrational arguments — and individuals who have the charisma to appear authoritative. This explanation for why so many Sephardim were duped by a small band of anti-Maimonidean kabbalists does not fully resolve the problem. Nor does 71

Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” 42, n. 150.

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it help us explain why the group of disgruntled Sephardim who chose to leave the community they saw infected by crazy mythical and mystical beliefs and taken over by poorly trained and egotistical fanatics should have taken the path of conversion to Catholicism. This choice was more than a miscalculation based on a faulty assessment of the real status of the Church in Spain before the final stages of the Reconquista were taken and the diverse, warring kingdoms and cities united in an increasingly centralized monarchy. It was a serious misinterpretation of their own programme of protecting “real” Judaism under the relatively harmless cover of nominal Christianity. Putting aside assertions that the Rambam was himself a crypto-kabbalist,72 the argument that his Aristotelian synthesis can be a model for modern thought seems fatuous. Nor can there be a strict dichotomy for what is Jewish philosophy — as opposed to merely philosophers who happen to be Jewish — and speculative Kabbalah. Much that is in the kabbalistic tradition can be shown to deal with primary philosophical problems of morality, cosmology, and logic, and is not merely mythical or idolatrous fantasizing. Moshe Halberstal, for example, points to the way in which both sides in the Maimonidean Controversy saw their arguments “rooted in the very structure of revelation,” and different attitudes towards the nature of that revelation called for cogent, systematic discussion of how complete, open-ended, and authoritative the revealed Law is and how much needed to be retrieved by close-analysis, to be extended to cover emerging issues and circumstances, and to be codified in super regulations.73 Halbertal properly reminds us at the end of his essay, “The complex matrix of life cannot be reduced to one story, and for that reason the body of halakhic literature present[s] us with multiple ones.” Faur juxtaposes the Christian authorities and customs that the kabbalists mirrored in their works, but there seems to be no hard evidence that the rabbis regularly studied Christian sources, visited churches and monasteries to observe liturgies and iconographic works, or conversed with priests and monks. What is much clearer is that, after their conversions to Christianity, former Jews often helped articulate and shape Catholic ideas and spiritual movements in Spain.74 As we have already shown, certain wealthy Jewish families formed alliances with Christian aristocratic clans for strategic purposes, 72

73 74

See Petru Noldovan’s review of Moshe Idel, Maimonides and the Jewish Mystical Tradition in JSRI 2 (Summer 2002), 218 ; online at http://hiphi.ubbbcluj.ro/JSRI/htmlyversion/ index/no_2/petrumoldovan-recenzie23. For an extreme view, see Rabbi Ariel Bar Tzadok, “Maimonides, Was He a Kabbalist?” (1995, 2002) on KosherTorah.com. “According to many sources, not only was the RaMBaM a secret Kabbalist, he was also a receiver of the Holy Zohar prior to it being publicly known.” Halbertal, “The History of Halakhah, Views from Within.”. Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” 43, n. 158.

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assigning to those members who would be baptized specific roles to play in the new social fields they would be allowed to enter — (a) courtly politics, finances and administration, (b) trade and commerce in a developing international and world-wide system, (c) intellectual and artistic advancement in universities, academies, and private institutions, (d) ecclesiastical governance and theological interpretation, and (e) military expertise in the post-chivalric army and navy and procurement of supplies. On the other hand, one people cannot live within the cultural zone of another without becoming aware of and sometimes even participating in the life of the hegemonic community, as we know occurred, not just when Jews lived as a Dhimmi minority-nation under Muslim political suzerainty, but also when they passed under Christian dominion. Tolerance of a sort did prevail in certain areas of Western Europe, including Iberia, and Jews would on special occasions process through the streets with their Christian neighbours and take part in some ecclesiastical, civic and royal celebrations. On the other hand, to reduce Judaism to one true tradition of strict early Gaonic or Maimonidean rationalism is to distort religious experience itself, and to traduce the intelligence and integrity of rabbis engaged in other aspects of Jewish thought and ritual life. There were and are many Judaisms possible, and consequently many ways of living alongside of or under the social control of others without necessarily assimilating to the point of cultural self-destruction. It is not good enough, in my view, to fall back on an amorphous concept like Zeitgeist to say that Jews breathed in the atmosphere of Christian piety because they lived in Spain, although it is useful to note that changes manifest themselves in times when the security of Jewish life was endangered. It is also important to take several steps back to view the debate from a different set of perspectives. There is, on the one hand, the way in which Maimonideanism developed in Yemen, which makes it possible to view the tradition outside of a specifically Christian cultural zone and therefore to be able to measure aspects of the rationalist philosophy that emerge without the controversy imposing its own distortions on the development. On the other hand, there is also the perspective from viewing the relationship of the Rambam and the Ramban by concentrating on Nachmanides and his followers, as well those who radically diverge into irrationalist and persecutory tendencies and those who seek to maintain the balance and linking to the original sources of Jewish thought without falling into extremism of any sort.

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WHAT HAPPENED TO YEMEN Had He given us the Sabbath, And not brought us to Mt. Sinai We should have thought it ample [Dayenu]! Had He brought us to Mt. Sinai, And not given us the Torah, We should have thought it ample [Dayenu]!75

While there is no hard evidence to prove the points we are trying to make about the reasons that lie behind the decisions taken in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by those few families of New Christians who chose, of their own free will, to migrate to New Spain, when the pressures increased on all former Jews suspected of heresy and treason, rather than to assimilate quietly or to escape from the Lands of Idolatry altogether and return to rabbinical communities in the circum Mediterranean world, we can set out the factors that were involved. Dayenu! While there is no way to establish to the satisfaction of professional historians, anthropologists or folklorists the specifics of why these same few families, perhaps numbering no more than one hundred persons, went even further beyond the boundaries of civilization to settle in the wild northern deserts of the territory that would be become New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and southern Colorado, we can present probable grounds for these decisions. Dayenu! While there are no letters or journals or monuments to bolster our argument and we can only at best rely on the vague testimony of their great-great-grandchildren four to five hundred years removed from these decisions, we can make educated guesses and then test them against what few shreds of historical records there are. Dayenu!

To show that following Maimonides by itself does not lead to the kind of developments that marked the rise of the Portuguese-Spanish Jewish nation in exile to which we have suggested the elaborate contraption of converted Jews, that is, New Christians, attached themselves in a hope of straddling the divide between Christian and Jew, as well as between Rambam and Ramban as central characterizations of the community as a functioning belief-system based on the Law, we will look at what happened in Yemen. Why Yemen? First of all, medieval Yemen was more in the mainstream of cultural activities than is the current Islamic republic of the same name. Second, given the importance of its role as a trading centre, with connections ramifying through the heartlands of Islam and out into central and southern Asia, as well as into the Mediterranean ports on either side of the sea, Yemen had rabbis and Jewish philosophers who tended to be sceptical of mystical and occultist tendencies. Consequently, they favoured more rational, sceptical and scientific 75

Saul Goodman, ed. and trans., Passover Haggadah (New York: The Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, 1962) p. 21.

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approaches to philosophical issues. Though hindsight allows us to see the strong Neo-Platonist tendencies that go back to Philo Judeus, the Yemenites considered themselves strong proponents of Maimonides’ Aristotelian rationalism.76 This silent contradiction in the midrashic authors who serve as philosophical authorities indicates that the debate between Rambam and Ramban, in a sense, occurs at the core of the apparently straightforward texts.77 Thus one of the authors, al-Wajîz al-Mughini, claims that not only does Torah comprise “all the sciences,” but enumerates three categories: first, “[m]athematics and most of the natural sciences,” then second, “[s]ome of the natural sciences and most of metaphysics,” and third, that part of metaphysics concerned with “the true nature of God.”78 Even more strongly on the side of this MaimonideanAristotelian view is Sirâj al-‘Uqûl when he writes: . . . the person who renders the sciences null and void and is hostile towards those who engage in them — it seems he thinks that the sciences pour down upon him in gushes. He is of degenerate temperament and hard to cure. The person who is of that disposition is in a worse state than he who receives his knowledge by uncritical faith.79

In Midrash ha-Hefeş the anonymous Yemenite author claims that among the three faculties of the human mind, “the rational, the thoughtful and the imaginative [t]he most noble of them is the rational . . . ”80 It is this rationality based on Aristotelian logic and scientific paradigms that informs the Maimonidean tradition that the commentators extrapolate and explore in their study of the Book of Genesis and related Scriptures. What they reject is superstition and occult fantasies. As Sirâj al-‘Uqûl puts it decisively: “Know that practical magic is a lie and a delusion; there is nothing at all about it that is true.” Yet this is not a rejection of “divine magic [which] is the pure truth that is saddled with no doubt,” with “magic” here defined as something other than the consequence of passions from the other side, the evil impulses, and instead the product of “control concerning which the rational faculty cannot have full knowledge.”81 To call it “magic” is to use a metaphor to explain the kind of kind of thinking that leaps beyond the limits of reason, not that which arises from superstition, ignorance and the delusions of wicked souls. In a way, this magic may be another term for what Maimonides himself calls prophecy, the capacity of the rationally trained mind to open itself to higher truths revealed from God, 76

77 78 79 80 81

Y. Tzvi Langermann, ed. and trans., Yemenite Midrash: Philosophical Commentaries on the Torah (New York and London: HarperSanFrancisco/HarperCollins for Samuel Bronfman Foundation, 1996), pp. xxv–xvii. Ibid, p. 5. Ibid, p. 13. Ibid, p. 15. Ibid, p. 25. Ibid, p. 62.

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truths which, although they necessarily can only be expressed indirectly and in hints through figurative language, should never be confused with the ramblings of ignorant and deluded minds. Like Maimonides, the author of the Midrash haBe’ur reminds the reader that such hints are sufficient: “One needn’t elaborate to the wise.”82 Even in regard to visionary dreams, the Yemenite midrashists tend to see the workings of reason and the higher, prophetic reasoning powers. Thus alWajîz al-Mughnî writes: That [prophetic dream] occurs as a result of equibalanced vapours that [result from] wholesome, balanced nourishment. Now if the temperament is pure, and the person is rightly guided by approved character traits and free from troubling thoughts — in that case his dream shall be a true one.83

Such a reasonable and balanced personality, guided by knowledge of the sciences and a controlled use of the imagination,84 will not only come to greater understanding and receive revealed wisdom from on high, but will be able to help improve the world (tikkun ha-olam) by theurgist actions. Mankind in general, because they are a combination of matter and form, relate as microcosm, olam hakitan, to the universe as to macrocosm, olam ha-gadol, while in more particular terms, Israel and God “are like conjoined twins; what befalls one also befalls the other,” according to al-Wajîz al-mughnî.85 Further than this, the righteous Jew, whose intellect has been trained in morality and logic, corrects faults in the world to come as well as in this world: “If he brings it into actuality by means of the sciences and items of knowledge,” says the Midrash ha-Hefeş, “he becomes holy and divine.”86 This same midrash then cites Rabbi Alexandroni: “Whoever busies himself with Torah brings about peace in the higher and lower entourages,” while Rabbi Levi is quoted as arguing: “He even brings the redemption closer . . . ”87 82 83 84

85 86 87

Langermann, Yemenite Midrash, p. 75. Ibid, p. 76. Radowicz explains that Maimonides’ sense of ‘aql has as its enemy, not feelings or emotions, but the khayāl, the imagination. This is the yetzer ha-ra, while ‘aqal is yetzer tov. For it is imagination which conceives of God in anthropomorphic terms (Studies in Jewish Thought, p 296). Though God must use deceit or guile, a form of cunning that operates within the limits of human understanding — at least until each person can achieve the higher states of intellection that culminate in a kind of mixed prophetic and philosophical mind — the terms and customs of the idolaters remain because they have absorbed into themselves the rational, legal and spiritual ideas of Jewish tradition (Rawidowicz, Studies in Jewish Thought, p. 289). It is on the basis of this principle, that ‘orma (idolatrous customs) can be the matrix of further midrashic intellection and historical transformations, as we suggest happens in the development of the Penitentes. This will be further discussed in both Chapters VII and VIII. Langermann, Yemenite Midrash, p. 78. Ibid, p. 79. Ibid, p. 79.

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Thus there are hidden things which only an elite few can train themselves to approach, but two dangers always lurk in this kind of enterprise. On one side of the coin, there is an over-emphasis on reason itself, as though the human mind could construct truths that are only ever fully known and experienced by God. This argument lies deep within the structures of Mishnaic Judaism as it was created and practiced by the Sages who tried to make sense of the world after the Fall of the Temple and the Loss of Jerusalem: in a kind of pastoral utopia, where the ideal citizen is the small farmer serving the timeless cult of sacrifices through the offices of a perfect priesthood, the intellectual elite of Israel dreamed of a way to escape from the harsh and demeaning realities of Roman rule and secondary status in their own land — as long as they could carry out the precepts of the Law (the mitzvoth) in their minds and in the asif rituals of the synagogue, they would maintain the sanctity of Israel and its special relationship with God. And on the other side of the coin, the turning aside from reason and philosophy and the dependence on fantastic selfconstructions which cannot be corroborated in either the Bible or the Talmud and assert themselves as privileged visionary experiences — and turn Israel away from the ineffable God to an idol or mythical dream. This shift from Mishnah’s utopian rationalism to the following commentaries marks the more radical transformation of rabbinical Judaism into one which comes to depend on the concept of zekuht, an inflowing of divine grace for acts of extreme passivity, humiliation and self-abnegation, acts that were performed by the holy forefathers and foremothers of Israel who accrued sufficient spiritual gifts from God to be passed on to subsequent generations, whether or not the later men and women were leading scholars, teachers, or social benefactors, as well as by humble, passive and simple Jews whose words and gestures to please their fellows also were deemed to please God. Not only pious Jews could benefit from such supererogatory works in the form of practical grace, such as abundant rainfall, good harvests and healthy families, but also non-Jewish foreigners and even apostates and their children. What the new Christian order proclaimed as the graceful gift of their messianic and mystical Saviour but not to those who murdered Him and continue to deny, the rabbis of the post-Mishnaic era claimed to be the special power of Jewish ancestors, humble and passive persons rejected and persecuted by the imperial Church, and open freely to all who behave with a generous, open, and simple heart. Why? Because, as Jacob Neusner explains in his lengthy gloss on these key Mishnaic and post-Mishnaic texts, God is pleased when mankind is pleased, remembers the good deeds of ancestors, and shares His ever-abundant sanctified powers with those who are created in His image. Ironically, as we shall see, the followers of Ramban, in all their spiritual and political arrogance, failed to achieve the status that would have made them deserving of zekhut, while the 315

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crushed and disheartened followers of Rambam, in their physical pains and their psychological humiliations, transformed the concept of zekhut. This unique concept of the Mishnah Sages and their successor rabbis is described by Neusner in the following way: Acts of will consisting of submission, on one’s own, to the will of Heaven endowed Israel with a lien and entitlement upon Heaven. What we cannot by will impose, we can by will evoke. What we cannot accomplish through coercion, we can achieve through submission. God will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, when we do for God what God cannot make us do.88

More precisely, and in more theological terms, Neusner continues: Zekhut stands for the empowerment of a supernatural character that derives from the virtue of one’s ancestry or from one’s own virtuous deeds of a very particular order . . . “the heritage of virtue and its consequent entitlements”.89

To a certain extent, which we will have to define in rather subtle terms, making all the proper adjustments to the changed circumstances, zekhut can be applied to the understanding of the Marranos on the Maradas. How so? We have already discussed how in Spain, the anti-Maimonideans feared that what Rambam was doing was stripping Judaism of its mystical insights and closing off the emotional powers of ritual and the performance of the mitzvoth from the collective body of Israel and particularly at a time when Judaism was under great new threats from the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time, the followers of the Rambam were afraid that the new Kabbalah, and even Nachmanides himself and his inner circle of disciples, were losing the essence of rabbinical Judaism — its controlled techniques of renewing itself through rational argument and the maintenance of legal principles against the encroachments of idolatry and mythology. It is now important to note how the old traditions of Sephardic Jewry were metamorphosed both in response to the external challenges posed by an aggressive and more powerful Christendom, particularly one aware at least partly of the difference between the classical Judaism of the Hebrew Bible and the newer versions of rabbinic Judaism of the Mishnah, Talmuds and other documents; and in response to the catastrophe of internal collapse occasioned by the split between Rambam and Ramban, in the sense we have started to describe, particularly with the rise to dominance, temporarily until the 1490s, of the party of Nachmanides, with its mysticism, charismatic authority, and breakdown of educational standards. 88

89

Jacob Neusner, Theological and Philosophical Premises of Judaism (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2008) p. 176. Ibid, p. 179.

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THE METAMORPHOSIS OF OLD SEPHARAD The sanctification of Israel, the people, endures in the absence of the cult and in alien, unclean territory and whatever the source of the food that Israel eats. Israel’s sanctity is eternal, un-contingent, absolute. — Jacob Neusner90 The main point is that, for the table unlike the altar, any Israelite (here including a Samaritan or an apostate) may perform the act of slaughter and it may be carried out at any time, day or night . . . “He who slaughters on the Sabbath or on the Day of Atonement, even though he [thereby] becomes liable for his life — his act of slaughter is valid” (Mishnahtractate Hullin 1:1) — Jacob Neusner91

At first blush, the rise to power of the mystics of Kabbalah and the defeat of the rationalism of the Maimonidean cause would seem to echo the changes that occurred in the first four centuries of the Common Era, when the Destruction of the Temple and the razing of Jerusalem created a crisis in Judaism: How can Israel exist without the agency of the priestly cult and the institutions of the national state? The Mishnah, according to Neusner, gave one set of answers in an idealized utopian vision of a Holy Israel living outside of time and space, beyond history and political contingencies. Fulfilment of the Law, performance of the mitzvoth, would stand in place of priests and princes, mediate between Heaven and Earth, and ensure the sanctity of the Children of Israel. Then came a second crisis hard on the heels of the first: the rise of Christianity claiming to be the New Israel, basing its case on the text of what they would call the Old Testament, and eventually gaining the legitimizing power of the Roman Empire. How could Judaism survive when it was a barely tolerated, second-rate, powerless religion and people? The answer lies, says Neusner, in the concept of zekhut, which empowers Israel precisely as Israel has no power, guarantees it spiritual favour and protection on the basis of ancestral deeds no longer possible, and promises spiritual salvation to those who submit in humility and grief to the subjugating state and ecclesia. In that, I am going to argue, lies the analogy with the situation and circumstances of the Marranos who joined the groups of Hispanic settlers who formed the Penitentes in northern Mexico and travelled into the wastelands where there were no priests, no churches, and no government officials. What is 90 91

Neusner, Theological and Philosophical Premises, p. vi. Ibid, p. 72.

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most striking, however, in terms of the argument that this trek into the empty space of corpse defilement and ghostly savages is that it constituted itself, so far as the secret Jews were concerned, on a principle that comes close to zekhut. It is seemingly impossible to conceive, certainly filled with contradictions, anomalies and other monstrous conjunctions and mixtures. To that extent, too, we have to understand it, not just by dismissing it as a mistake — a terrible blunder made by the first generation and then compounded over the centuries by children and grandchildren who lost touch the Jewish learning, memory and feelings — or by putting it to the side in an act of Incidentalism. Rather, we must measure it as a peculiar variant of the Baroque imagination typical of its age. What Jacob Neusner attempts to explain about Formative Judaism in the time of the Sages, that is, in the compiling and redaction of the Mishnah, is that a new concept of time, place, and history was created to compensate for the destruction of the Temple, the loss of the political state of Israel, and the scattering of Israel the people around the world. In no simple system of analogies, the Sages set forth a way of securing the primacy of Israel as central to the relation with God and the sanctifying power of the priestly cult by reassessing the domestic table vis à vis the sacrificial altar: the growing of beasts for food, their ritual slaughter after expert monitoring of their cleanness, and the preparation in the home for cooking and eating. It may seem surprising to those who are not familiar with the most profound levels of rabbinical thought that Samaritans and apostates are seen in the sequence of degrees of holiness here; but this extension rather than absolute difference between those inside and outside the boundaries of the most sacred of all places — concentrically from within the Holy of Holies through the precincts of the Temple itself and further through the walls of the City of Jerusalem and beyond to the borders of the Land of Israel and from thence into the land of the goyim, the non-Jewish nations, where corpse- uncleanness is rife and consequently ghosts and demons wander in the contaminated wilderness — suggests ways in which the men and women who felt compelled to separate themselves from the House of Israel for various political and theological reasons could nevertheless believe that they still remained a part of the sanctified Israel — and indeed in this very act of separation that they hoped would at once enhance and protect the Law would keep Israel alive in its holy duties. Thus, though there are degrees of holiness in this new relationship imagined by the Sages of Mishnah, that is, both similarities and differences between animals killed by the priests in the Temple and those by secular specialists for regular meals, the presence of each — ways in which the processes are alike and not alike — this unequal continuity ensures that the functional sanctity of Israel continues after the destruction, loss, and scattering. On top of this, the crisis deepened in those years after the redaction of the Mishnah when Christianity was able to challenge Judaism openly and with the backing of the 318

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imperial Roman state, and thus made the conditions that seemed to justify the first utopian vision nugatory. The first utopianism was based on an ahistorical rationalism and cushioned by a political order that did not seek to extirpate Israel once the great Jewish rebellions had been put down and allowed individuals and small groups to operate below the level of state power. The hostility of the Church as the official religion of the Empire, however, could not be ignored. The successor rabbis had to confront the historical facts. In a similar way, the first generations of conversos thought they could hide their Jewishness even as they surrendered their Judaism, and that they could assimilate into the social, political and ecclesiastical life of Christian Spain and Portugal without losing their essential individual and family identities as Sephardim. The establishment of the Inquisition and the promulgation of Statutes of Blood Purity, along with popular resentment and jealousy of their success, meant that the subsequent generations following those of the original New Christians had each to confront the old problems of exclusion, discrimination and persecution while now having, for one, lost the support of the remaining Jewish community and, for the other, being liable as Catholics to charges of heresy and treason. Could they innovate and create viable options in the way the second generation of Sages were able to do in writing the Talmud of the Land of Israel and related commentaries on and enhancements of the Law — through the myth of zekhut? In the fifth and following centuries, this shocking conception of zekhut and the administrative decisions taken upon it were not justifiable by the essential rules of halachic argument. This is because the Mishnah, despite its desire to be a timeless and utopian rationality, cannot be practically authoritative for People of Israel (am yisroel) in its Diaspora (galut) without talmudic and midrashic interpretations (gamorot), in the same way as the Tanakh provide only at best ambiguous principles and more usually unclear directives. Hence, the breakdown of rabbinic structures in late medieval Iberia spelled another major crisis for Jews, whether they chose to go further into exile, to convert under duress or voluntarily with the hope of either an eventual return to open Judaism or an uncertain future as secret Jews — or more problematical Marrano life. For whatever choices were made in the first instance by one generation of conversos, subsequent generations were confronted by harsh (if not impossible, ey-efesheh) realities and unexpected stumbling blocks and persecutory contraptions, all of which proved to be almost totally destructive of Jewish values and demoralizing to the Children of Israel. It is also, as Neusner emphasizes, “a basically antihistorical reading of history.”92 José Faur has another explanation for “the dissolution of Jewish values and the demoralization of the people.”93 He shows In the Shadow of History that the 92 93

Neusner, Theological and Philosophical Premises, p. 185. Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” 44.

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real question isn’t why did so many Jews fail to keep the faith in the period of 1390 to 1492 and seemed to convert without coercion or intimidation — of course, along with many anousim, who were indeed forced to the baptismal fonts: but how could so many hundreds of thousands still choose martyrdom or exile rather than conversion?94 How could they, in other words, find spaces to hide that they deemed not only safe, but spiritually rewarding? And were they hiding only from the historical powers of the Catholic Monarchs and the Holy Inquisition? Or were they hiding from something else — and in a different way, a way that made hiding worthy, virtuous, and receptive of spiritual power from their martyr ancestors and from their own anxiety, fears, humiliations and pains? Did they feel they had to hide from the world in order to be seen by God? This other explanation is psychological. The reason why the antiMaimonideans turned away from the rational and scientific bases of Judaism was that they had been traumatized by the experiences of the past two and a half centuries. This disturbed mental state manifests itself in the grasping after demonic and necromantic experiences, so that many Jews95 became at once the poison containers into which Christian society poured their hateful and unbearable feelings of uncleanness — and they did so throughout Europe since well before the massacres of the first two Crusades and through the development of scandals of blood libels and well poisonings, as in their witchhunts, sought means of destroying the demons within themselves by projecting them onto the others in their midst. But these demonic social alters created in the collective consciousness driven to the extreme by real and imagined assaults on their bodies and souls, as individuals and as families, were also real human beings. They were Jewish men, women, and children. To be so conceived by the powerful forces that control almost every facet of your life, obviously, was very unpleasant, to put it mildly, especially when the psychotic projections were accompanied by both spontaneous and organized institutional violence. In such “mimetic response,” Faur wisely suggests, Jews identified with their oppressors, to the extent of adopting, in only vaguely distorted disguises, the principles and practices of the Christians and, at the same time, projected “their own demons onto their own ‘other,’ the Maimonideans.”96 It is not part of Faur’s brief to explain how this mimetic psychosis, or folie à deux, comes into being. He has shown clearly enough that “antiMaimonideanism was a subversive movement,”97 one which “elevated spiritism 94 95

96 97

Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” 46. They were not all Sephardim; the effects of the persecutions and trauma were also felt among Sicilian and Italian Jews, as well as among the Catalonian and Provençal Jews along what is now the French Mediterranean coast. Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” 50. Ibid.

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[sic] to a supreme dogma,” and they do this by “following not the Rabbis but a basic Christian dogma.”98 His conclusion is rich with implications because he looks at how not why the anti-Maimonideans were so successful in presenting themselves to posterity as the true heirs of Talmudic authority and to many contemporary historians. “Instead of writing their own books,” Faur says, many anti-Maimonideans expressed their views in the books of others. With this aim in mind, they used popular works, such as the Halakhot of R. Isaac Alfasi and Maimonides; Mishne Torah as conduits (in ‘aggressive’ editing, by appending glosses, ‘commentaries’ and digressions, or by introducing slight changes that would not be noticed by the unsuspecting reader).99

In other words, this subversion, if that is what it is, of Judaism had been promulgated by that group of rabbis afraid or unable by poor education to confront their opponents100 in rational, talmudic discourse, and they have therefore “possessed” their souls, as it were, so that they can at once “impute to them” the otherness feared and rejected in themselves — that is, the Christian patterns of thought and feeling they have absorbed in order to fight the collapse or negation of their own Jewishness that they can no longer intellectually sustain; and become “the inerrant pious” who are the Christian demons that have not allowed them to be Jews.101 My argument is somewhat different: namely, that, on the one hand, the original medieval Maimonidean controversies were neither simple nor consistent, and it would inaccurate to conceive of two clear camps battling for control of the Jewish heart and mind. Nachmanides and other rabbis were not all and always fools or ignoramuses, and their attempts to protect Jewish communities and Judaism from collapsing before the Christian onslaught has to be understood and respected. Without the benefit of hindsight, the parties to the Maimonidean controversies took positions that seemed at the time proper. They were, as we have been trying to say throughout this book, often wrong. They miscalculated. They misinterpreted the signs. To be sure! But there were fools and ignoramuses on all sides, and the renegade former-Jews on the Christian side, though terribly wrong in strict halakhic terms, nevertheless could manipulate circumstances where they had the backing of Church and State behind them. The writing out in increasingly elaborate terms of Kabbalah during this period can be seen as something other than the failure of Jewish intellectuals to follow the precepts of the Rambam. It was partly a response to 98 99 100

101

Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” 51. Ibid, 52. In other words, not all Sephardic rabbis, but only those who failed, and whose failure disheartened the community and led them astray. Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” 52.

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the challenge of the rationalists, who were probably perceived as eviscerating Judaism of its most profound mystical core of beliefs, as well as an active means of marshalling spiritual forces to contest a Christian hegemony that virtually all the military and political power on its side.

A HERITAGE OF GUILT If, then, according to Judaism, supreme authority adheres neither to the high priest, nor to the king, nor to an elite, nor even to the entire people as a collectivity, where is it to be found? — Elijah Benmozegh102

It is therefore important to see that the onset of this new mode of kabbalah so contrary to the traditions promoted and protected by the Rambam can also be understood in another way, one that is more creative and positive, in the sense that rabbinic minds at once set to work to comment, interpret, and thus to assimilate the theurgic myths adapted from a variety of surrounding and antecedent cultures in traditional Jewish ways; so that in due course, as Judaism, increasingly traumatized by its isolation and alienation from much of the modernity created by the Renaissance and Reformation, generated a dynamic set of beliefs to counter-balance the superstitious and persecutory institutions Shasha, for one, sees as distorting completely the Ashkenazi world from the seventeenth century onwards. Just as amongst the Christian developers of the New Philosophies and New Sciences the shift was away from Aristotelian systems to Neo-Platonic processes, so, I suggest, with all due provisos and caveats, the return to liberal, universal and rational Judaism was through those rabbis who followed the Ramban’s lead in exploring the new kabbalistic emanationist myths and Gnostic schemes of transforming reality rather than those who retreated into pilpul tautologies and fundamentalist orthodoxy.103 It is important to note that one of the most important non-Ashkenazi rabbinical thinkers of the nineteenth century, Eli Benmozegh, was a universalising, religious Humanist and, at the same time, a devout kabbalist who took 102 103

Benmozegh, Israel and Humanity, p. 289. The argument is strengthened by the evidence shown of how significant were Jewish mathematicians and physicians in the Renaissance whose backgrounds were not in the Rambam’s tradition but rather the kabbalistic knowledge that underpinned much of this Sephardic civilization; see Paulo Mendes Pinto, “Os sefarditas portugueses e a ciência do Renascimento: ensaio sobre religião, ciência & utensilagem mental” based on a lecture given at the “Patriarca Nestor” Institute of History of Science, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Câtedra de Estodos Sefarditas “Alberto Beneveniste”.

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his inspiration from Tanakh, Talmud and Zohar. By examining his writings, it will be possible to show that talmudism and Kabbalah do not contradict one another, just as, in this same Italian rabbi of Moroccan descent, there is no exclusion of knowledge and cooperation with Classical and Christian civilizations. On the other hand, to understand the psychological reasons for the apparent collapse of so many Sephardic Jews into irrationality and superstition, or the acceptance of baptism without a fight in the course of the fifteenth century, needs further psychological discussion than Faur gives. Interestingly, too, as Faur points out, and as we shall discuss in the next three chapters, the place where Maimonidean rationality was perhaps best preserved was in converso culture, that is, among those Jews who seem on the surface to have disappeared and whose hearts and minds have become one with the Christianity they legally and publicly identify with. In other words, the multi-layered crises occurring both in Sepharad and in Ashkenaz as they find themselves dislocated and isolated by the circumstances of Christian Europe’s violent entry into the modern world, are not merely demeaning, distorting and desperate acts of self-destruction almost from a Maimonidean perspective; and, at the same time — but not always coherently, consistently or congenially — a number of self-protective strategies. Many of these tricks and illusions were concealed within and sometimes emanating from the point of seemingly least resistance to the outside pressures, namely, in the Marrano mentality, that place where Judaism and Jewishness disappear from view and perhaps from consciousness itself. When we try to see the Maimonidean Controversies as the generic tension between the rational and the irrationalism in Judaism even into our own day, with the specific points at issue as variations on those in other ages, do we have to take sides? Can we imagine a religion that is purely legalistic and rational both in practice and in study, or one that is only ecstatic and filled with emotionalism? Emmanuel Levinas reminds us of the importance of the irrational, the numinous and the sacramental104 in religious experience, while not claiming that those qualities either exclude rationality, legal precepts or scientific methods of analysis and argumentation. There is then a way to approach the inventiveness and creativity of midrashic poetry and the spiritual ecstasies of kabbalah that does not mean abrogation of reason or of traditional rabbinic authority. Mystic and aesthetic aspects of interpretation and expansion of texts can allow Jewish experience to grow with changing times and new challenges, partly by ensuring that there is a balance between the different approaches to the enterprise of living in the world guided by the revelations of the written and oral Torah and 104

G. Hansel, “Emmanuel Levinas et le christianisme” online at http://ghansel.free.fr/ levchr.

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that debate begins with and remains true to the insights and heritage of “the words of the sages.” Let us look at these several factors again more closely still, beginning with the nature of the Maimonidean controversies. The repeated attempts to ban the study of philosophy and literature, such as they were then conceived, indicates not only the persecutory strain in the local rabbinate but also the resistance of a sufficient number to warrant such decrees. One of the new channels of cultural participation in the non-Jewish world was the kabbalah of Catalonia and Provençe, and many Jewish mystics worked with Neo-Platonic thinkers amongst the Christians to explore a dynamic way of thinking that would lead away from the scholasticism of the universities to the scientific academies of the Renaissance. It was not only in far-off Yemen during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that the Maimonidean tradition encouraged a tradition of midrashic discourse on philosophy and science.105 Part of the reason that many Sephardic Jews sought conversion to Christianity, I opine, was that they had lost faith in the restrictive establishment of anti-Maimonidean rabbis. But their rush to the baptismal font was not always a repudiation of Judaism per se or an embrace of Catholicism; it was rather a disillusionment with contemporary religious culture in general among all peoples they came in contact with and perhaps a naive hope that Iberian society would continue or return to its more tolerant pluralism or would at least permit these conversos to enter the universities and professions and lead more rational and socially successful lives, a disillusionment also fostered by their tendency towards Averroism and non-dogmatic speculations. The benefits, however, were usually short-lived, insofar as by the mid-sixteenth century regulations on limpieza de sangre drew a sharp divide between Old and New Christians, excluding Jews from full participation in Spanish society on biological grounds of tainted blood. The establishment of the Inquisition also made all conversos implicitly suspect of judaizing. Whether they wished to be so considered or not — and whether they were even aware of their residual Jewishness — the New Christians were confronted by the need to clarify for themselves who and what they were so that, when denounced to the Holy Office, they knew whether to concede their heretical ways and beg for mercy, to use all their skills as negotiators, debaters and diplomats to manipulate some sort of compromise with the persecuting institutions of state and church, or to affirm their Jewishness and make every effort in the time remaining to them to learn the Law of Moses. Though most New Christians either managed to escape from the Lands of Idolatry and returned to Jewish life in other parts of Europe or the Levant or were assimilated into Catholic society and their descendants 105

“Appendix One: The Midrashic Authors,” Langermann, Yemenite Midrash, pp. 265–281; also “Appendix Three: The Reception of Maimonides,” pp. 290–296.

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lost all awareness of their prior condition, Portuguese Jewry — with a sizable proportion of Castilian Jews who crossed the borders in 1492 — were able to develop a fairly coherent Crypto-Judaism until the foundation of the Portuguese Inquisition almost fifty years later. It was from this Naçio of PortugueseSpanish Jews that most of the Crypto-Jews and Marranos came who developed what Faur calls converso culture. This highly educated élite spread out into the New Worlds, East and West, while a small minority often continued to live as nominal Christians, and even when it was possible sporadically to return to Judaism. They seem to have done so, not merely out of the venial and selfserving reasons often adduced to explain their reluctance to leave the Hispanic cultural zones, where the Inquisition remained a constant threat, but for at least two other reasons. One reason is that they experienced their Jewishness in a fragmented, incoherent manner through the dominant filter of their Catholic and Portuguese or Spanish cultures, and what they could see or learn of Judaism was already tainted by anti-Semitic ideologies. Though they feared the expropriations and tortures of the Holy Office, they did not feel a strong revulsion from the civilization to which they belonged, in a way not dissimilar to many Germans in the 1930s resisted leaving their homes and businesses precisely because they felt more strongly identified as Germans than as Jews. The other reason is that very ordeal of concealment and duplicity involved with Marranism provided more self-fulfilment in a psychological, emotional, and spiritual way than either Catholicism by itself or a Judaism that was so imbued with desiccated rabbinical strictures that it did not satisfy their inner cravings for the idealized but nevertheless pseudo-Judaism they constructed from and through the Christian Bible and anti-Jewish treatises. This thrill of deception and the excitement of defying and virtually daring the Inquisition to arrest them gave to the Marrano a sense of being in a special relationship with God. While both Roman Catholicism in its Tridentine forms and the reconstituted Jewish structures of defensive communities insisted on ideological conformity and participation in elaborate public rituals, the Marrano was swept towards modernism in the insistence on private and inward faith. Therefore, in our argument we do not deny the so-called “obscurantism” and persecutory fundamentalism of Ashkenazi and Yiddishkeit in Eastern Europe that Shasha tends to excoriate in his promotion of the Levantine Option. Nor do we seek only to stay within those traditions that developed before and then after the imposition of what José Faur terms the persecutory structures106 of Jewish communities under siege and forced to adopt the strategies of the hegemonic churches and states that threaten their resettlement after the crises of mass conversion and expulsion. Certainly, Faur stresses that such “persecutory” 106

José Faur, “Newton, Maimonidean” Sephardic Heritage Update (11 February 2004) 3; originally printed in The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 6:2–3 (2003).

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acts by rabbinical authorities were not driven by malice107 but arose in selfdefence as small Sephardic communities either attempted to protect themselves from the onslaught of conversionary pressures before the fatal date of 1492 or faced the daunting task of reconstituting themselves in new and often precarious conditions afterwards and not least were aware that unless they could control recalcitrant returnees to Judaism, like Baruch Spinoza or Uriel da Costa, they would alienate their privileges in Christian society. Like the Counter-Reformation Catholicism that began to stress extratextual revelations through private visions as a way of bolstering its control over society, however, Jewish mysticism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fused Sephardic and Ashkenazi traditions in Safed and then popularized the new Lurianic kabbalah, culminating in the fiasco of Sabbateanism, on the one hand, and creating the conditions for the emergence of East European Hasidism, on the other. Both results mark a Judaism almost crushed by persecutions, expulsions, massacres and ghettoization. A society that accepts magic and the reveries of lunatics as God’s True Word, would not tolerate rational discourse — least of all the scientific study of nature or an intelligent consideration of Judaism.108

Though this book is not a historical study of these ideological changes and clashes within Judaism in the transition from medieval to modern terms, it is an attempt to regain cultural equilibrium and establish a secure and at the same time dynamic point from which to engage with the peoples, ideas, and institutions that eventually developed in Penitente lands. Such a position allows us to approach the delusionary atmosphere of the Brotherhood in the days of its foundation, less in the late than in the early nineteenth century, and, of course, further back to the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, These were dates that must have been experienced by the New Christians among the other Hispanic settlers as fraught with spiritual dangers — so that it seemed a descent into territory swarming with ghosts, zombies, and other unclean creatures, swirling with vicious savages and devious agents of the Inquisition, and self-doubts and self-loathing made manifest in the very acts each person felt compelled to perform to keep him or herself safe. Nor do we think that the traditions of tolerance and openness to nonJewish ideas only went underground in a converso culture, as Faur suggests.109 But certainly the converso element, and perhaps the even more fuzzy Jewishness of Marrano traditions, provided one conduit through which the older culture could continue to exist and draw from the very society that kept it concealed 107 108 109

Faur, “Newton, Maimonidean” 13, n. viii. Ibid, 3. Faur, In the Shadow of History, pp. 4–5.

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and cut off from much of its intellectual sources. Often the disguise of the Crypto-Jew included professional training in Catholic universities and so the individuals who eventually travelled to the West and sometimes, but not always, returned to a Judaism created in their own troubled souls: they opened up a site for interfaith dialogue and development. By attending to such troubled souls, we hope to explore some of the questions held in a kind of abeyance or slowmotion engagement between Judaism and the hegemonic civilization, and to understand how such souls marched towards the modern notions of mind and personality.

THE MEAN SON’S QUESTION The mean one [evil or rash], what does he say? “Of what use is this service [avodah] to you? To you, and not to him, as if he were not one of us. Thus he denies the loyalty to one’s own people which is a sacred bond. Answer him as he deserves: That if he had been in Egypt, by denying his kinship with his people, he would not have been liberated.110

On the other hand, when we examine that Jewish-Arabic tradition, we find that even Maimonides’ son David Maimonides acted as a go-between for the theosophies of the East; that is he stood “at the confluence of Sufism and rabbinic Pietism,” between Ishmael and Israel.111 According to Michel Chodkiewicz, there existed in medieval Egyptian Judaism a “pietist circle of the Sufi type”112 in which the Maimonides family played a role, and these Egyptian Hassidim interacted with Muslim mystics to create “the rich cultural and spiritual symbiosis of which the documents [in the Cairo Geniza] bear witness.” In other words, the argument that kabbalah is not relevant to the Jewish Arabic tradition does not work. Just as the Sufis rebelled against the legalism and dogmatism of their Islamic faith,113 so too did the Jewish pietists in both East and West. By the thirteenth century, says Laurent Cohen, the rebellion within Islam was replaced by the mainstreaming of Sufi mysticism, at least in Egypt; it formed “une composante incontornable de la 110

111

112 113

Goodman, “The Four Sons,” Passover Haggadah, pp. 16–17. I have modified the English translation. Anonymous comments on Paul Fenton, ed. and trans. Deux traités de mystique juive : Le Traité du Puits et le Guide du Détachement (Paris : Le Verdier, 1987) on their website Fiche livre at http://www. Editions-verdier.fr/hebreu/titres_myst_juive. Michel Chodkiewicz in Studia Islamica cited on the Editions Verdier Fische livre. Laurent Cohen, “Juifs et Soufis en terre d’Islam”, Tribune juive (15 décembre 1994) cited on the Editions Verdier Fische livre.

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réalité religieuse et ses adeptes peuvent s’afficher de plus en plus librement.” So too, in the Ashkenazi world, kabbalistic thinking became increasingly acceptable and was integrated both into liturgy and exegetical practice. But while Cohen argues that Jewish mystics in Egypt were moderate compared to their Islamic counterparts, it may be that, because opposition remained strong among certain pilpulists and mitnagim, Jewish pietism could often go to extremes, either in the elaborate occultism of the Sefad-Lurianic school or in the activist antinomianism of Sabbateanism and Frankism. In parts of Eastern Europe where oppression and isolation continued through the nineteenth century, a strange parallel-play could exist between two kinds of withdrawal strategies, on the one hand, the Beshist Hassidim and, on the other, the inward-turning Ultra-Orthodox. When possible, however, Ashkenazim found alternative means of being Jews — or of not being Jews. The Haskallah, as we have pointed out, offered various modes of accommodation with the surrounding Christian societies, particularly in the larger German-speaking cities, and this would eventually lead to the formation of Reformed versions of Judaism, as well as providing the means for assimilating into the contextual cultures without actually having to convert. There were also increasingly political revolutionary organizations that saw Ashkenazim translating their spiritual enthusiasm for tikkun, repairing the world, and universalizing their prophetic and moral faith into seemingly nonJewish activism. These trends included Socialism and Zionism, to be sure, but also may be seen to include a tendency towards identification with the new positivist sciences, the performing and contemplative arts, and the development of liberal, capitalist democracies. In many ways, too, rather than there being a consensus within European Judaism that was persecutory, pilpulist and anti-intellectual, as Shasha avers, we would rather see creative and dynamic differences, and a renascent commitment to aesthetic, philosophical, and social activism repressed in the Western World for almost a thousand years, except in the Golden Age of Spain. This modern resurgence of Jewish non-religious energy today flowers mostly in the United States and in Israel.

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Speaking of an elderly aunt: “ . . . and she told me a story that gave me the creeps. It was like this [before I was born]. She said that on some days of the week her mother would dress up with her best dress and everybody would sit around the table and my greatgreat-grandfather would wait for the first star to come out. Then they would lock themselves in the house and my great-grandmother would gather everybody at the table, they would light up some candles and my great-grandfather, MANOEL CANUTO DE OLIVIERA, who was an elderly man, probably in his eighties, would pray and sing in a language that my aunt could not recognize. She was very young, about 5 and that was really fun for her, prattling these prayers and songs. And when I heard the story, I became very curious. “What the hell is the tradition that dates back 100s of years? In what language did he pray? On which days did it happen? Why did they lock themselves in?” So I started wondering. — Luciano Oliviera1 O damned spirits, you can do nothing but what the hand of God allows. I tell you in the name of Almighty God you may do to my body whatever God permits, and I will readily endure it, seeing that I have greater enemy than my own body. So if you avenge on my own body, you will do me a great service. — Saint Francis of Assisi2

1

2

A Estrela Oculta do Sertão (Marranos in Northeast of Brazil), a documentary film made in Brazil. Luciano Oliviero is a physician seeking, on behalf of fellow anousim, for Jewish authorities willing to help a return to rabbinical institutions without being considered converts. Francis, Saint. The Little Flowers with Five Considerations on the Sacred Stigmata, trans. Leo Shirley-Price (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1959), p. 149.

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A RHETORIC OF BLOOD From perhaps the late 17th Century the northernmost territories of New Spain (today Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado) became the site for the performance of intense penitential rites, including individuals undergoing painful imitations of the Passion. These dramatic Catholic rites became the defining experience of brotherhoods of small, marginalized and isolated Hispanic communities. Though members today often seek to minimize the place of these bloody crucifixions and emphasize instead community bonding and good works, the self-imposed virtual torture nonetheless marks the Hermandad and its complicated history in this part of the world. This chapter will focus on the rhetorical, dramatic and psychological nature of the phenomenon — as an example of enargeia, ekphrasis, phantasia and ludibrium. It should be clear, then, that to understand the phenomenon of the Penitentes, whose defining activity is the performance of painful imitations of Christ’s Passion, that we have to see within several contexts simultaneously: • Within the local history and folklore of the region of the southwestern states of America as something performed by small communities of Chicanos marginalized and alienated by the hegemonic society for about four hundred years; • As part of Mexican history and culture from the earliest period of Spanish colonial conquest and settlement, these marginalized groups and this region representing some of the most isolated elements in the enterprise. Nevertheless they constitute a variation within Spanish civilization in both its post-Reconquista phase and its development within Counter-Reformation (Tridentine) discipline. • As such, therefore, the Penitentes are a baroque phenomenon, its aesthetic, symbolic and performative characteristics understood within the context of West European religious and artistic history. 331

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Further, once those levels of phenomenological operation are recognized, it is necessary to establish a more historical set of perspectives. Received opinion about the Penitentes sees its origins in four overlapping and unequal sources: • In a migrant community of mostly uneducated Hispanic sheepherders, small farmers and craftsmen — individuals and families who became isolated from regular Catholic liturgical and pastoral care and who established their own small, ad hoc brotherhoods to look after their spiritual and moral needs — the members relied on their knowledge and experience of religious concepts as translated through oral traditions, secondary works of art, and amateur creativity. Even in the eighteenth century, when under nominal control of the Franciscan Order, these most northerly territories of New Spain were neglected; but the situation was made worse for the settlers, first, after the independence of Mexico was achieved, and then, after these territories passed to United States rule. In each case, priests and friars became rarer, concern by ecclesiastical authorities diminished, and the attitudes of new settlers and governors more hostile. In addition to isolation and neglect, the new element of hostility — that is, prejudice by intellectual Catholic missionaries, aggressive Protestant settlers and preachers, and north-European pioneers eager to take over lands farmed by the Mexican remnant — turned the Penitente movement defensive, inwards and secretive. From the 1830s to the 1940s the brotherhood was outlawed. • Yet the Brotherhood of Penitents derived from Roman Catholic models of affective piety developed in Mexico from medieval European antecedents. In particular, it seems to be an outgrowth of Third Order Franciscan lay piety, but with many features of self-disciplined penitential exercises derived from Flagellant groups in Italy and elsewhere in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Catechismal processions and miracle plays that were part of Franciscan community teachings would have been familiar as key sources of religious themes and imagery for those who were illiterate and were cut off from sermons and other counseling. Locally-made cult objects associated with these processions and festivals were imitations of icons, crucifixes and other sacred art (santos) produced in southern Mexico or imported from Spain. Similarly each community of brothers composed its own prayers and hymns on recollected models of Franciscan missionary practice. Having thus established the phenomenological characteristics of the marginal worshippers and outlined the received view of probable origins and disposition of these practices, we can return to the four classic rhetorical terms mentioned at the start of this chapter and then discuss them in a new light of the rich religious experience of the Penitentes. In so doing, moreover, these concepts widen the perspective from notions of public oratorical display — homiletic examples of spirituality, processional unfolding of community worship, and manifestations of individual piety — to aesthetic considerations: 332

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this last perspective taking our discussion from stylistic forms in the history of religious art, popularization of scholarly iconography, and self-realizations of traditional ecclesiastical cult objects. ENARGEIA This is a term from rhetorical theory that designates an intensity of figurative speech so powerful — overwhelming — that it persuades its audience to believe in the truth, literal and juridical, of the argument they are hearing. The theory presumes that the power of the words used in a public setting ignites such vivid images in the mind of the audience that they feel this imaginary experience as though it were a real, present, and historical event.3 3

One of the most important essays in regard to a modern utilization of enargeia in literary and cultural studies is Carlo Ginzburg’s “Learning from the Enemy: On the French Prehistory of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion” given as a talk to the European Colloquium at UCLA on 16 February 2006 and now available online at http://www. sscnet.ucla.edu/history/events/coll-conf/euroco . . . nmy-Los_Angeles_2006. The key statement is in the first paragraph of this essay: “The word ‘evidence’ is a piece of evidence in itself. In writing about rhetoric, Cicero and Quintillian argued that one of the attributes of a good speech was evidential: the ability to make a topic not only evident, but palpable, ‘vivid.’ Evidentia was a translation of the Greek enargeia: a word used to praise historians, poets, and painters, since all seemed to share an uncanny capacity to use words or colours to conjure up absent realities, belonging either to the past or to the real of fiction.” The reference here to the “uncanny” recalls, of course, Freud’s discussions of the Unheimlich, just as the ability to “conjure up” images in the mind’s eye points towards notions of psychological “magic”, or what the Greeks also knew as ekspexis, vividness at its most intense powers, and that is related to autopsia, defined by Ginzburg in this same essay as “direct visual experience of an event . . . conveyed by stylistic ‘vividness.’” Picking up Ginzburg’s ideas in the essay just discussed, Walder Nardon expands further in an article entitled “Una forma evidente” first presented at the Seminario Internazionale sul Romanzo (SIR) and printed in Zabaldroni e alter meraviglia Anna VI (2008) and available online at http://www.zibaldoni.it/wsc/default. asp?PagePart=page&StrIdPaginatorMenu=23&St (seen 13/09/2008). While I touch on this configuration of terms and concepts here, a fuller discussion will have to wait for another book now in the works. For the moment, it should suffice to say that unlike the Ancient and Modern authors cited by Nardon in his talk, who had two approaches to what constitutes “evidence”, one as the rhetorical persuasion of vivid speech, the other as documentary texts attested to be genuine artefacts of the persons, places, things, events and ideas in question, the rabbis had a different concept: by their intense focus on the words in the revealed Writings, they sought to return to the original divine word, with all its potency for transformation and creation of the world. The rabbis considered each word as a visible inscription, a sign, a transcription of sounds, and a vehicle of sense implicit and explicit. They used their ingenuity to shatter the surface of the given text, to scatter its component parts, to reassemble them in as many ways as possible consistent with their own rules and adherence to the Law, and thus to open up the illusory shadow of what the passage seems to say in order to reveal the new reality that is created by the release of that primary voice.

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In regard to the Penitentes, for specific historical reasons, the brothers undertake to realize this rhetorical figure in real time and place by articulating the suffering of Christ on their own persons. The brothers collectively re-enact the Passion from within an imitatio Christi that is experienced by one man on behalf of all. It is not that the deception or illusion of the crucifixion convinces the audience to experience at second or third hand the work of art — as occurs in a painting, sculpture or dramatic performance — but through a consolidation of real pain inflicted (by themselves) on one brother. This real pain, we might say, collapses time and space so that the brothers are for a moment of ecstatic worship at one with Christ, in the same sense as communicants are when the worshipper in the Eucharist partake of the Real Presence of Christ — not as a symbolic or iconic reproduction of the affective reality, not as a memorial celebration of what once happened and is hoped to recur in the mystical future Second Coming, but as a metonymic continuation or extension of the actual salvific act. EKPHRASIS In a simple sense, ekphrasis is the figure in which a written text describes a real or imagined work of art, such as a painting or a statue. But in a more complex way, the figure refers to a way in which there are creative transfers and deepened insights between two or more media of expression and so kinds of mimesis, imitations of reality or fantasy.

The tendency in ekphrasis4 is for the visual, tactile and spatial reality of a work of art to be translated into a verbal illusion, for the illusion of the work of art to be created “in the mind’s eye” of the audience, and thus to be transformed into a different kind of experience — one, as Lessing pointed out, is created within the time-movement and abstracted allusionary framework of literature rather than the visual arts. The result of this rhetorical trick is for the words of a spoken or written text to trigger responses in the mind of the listener or reader. These triggered responses are translated by the mind into a mental image with some of the same affective results as a real or fictional work of art. This is done in order to simulate the feelings or meanings supposedly inherent in the recalled or generated illusion of that work of art. For the Penitentes, their memory images are of at least three kinds of prior experiences, if not of each individual then of the group as a collective with an historical continuity. First, there are santos and other objects of worship created, treasured, and passed on through families and the whole community 4

Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

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which represent both the iconography of Christian worship practiced and believed in by the surrounding culture and, because locally produced for the most part by known artists in the local group, imbued with private associations to specific individuals and families. Second, the objects of devotion and meditation stand in the place of (a) more sophisticated and aesthetically crafted works of art from Old Mexico and Spain, (b) shifting artistic styles and theological understandings of the Church’s iconography in its move from late medieval and Gothic through Renaissance traditions to the Baroque and Rococo styles generated by the CounterReformation from the Council of Trent’s decrees, and (c) the teachings and practices of the Franciscan Friars who were charged with the spiritual and pastoral care of the region in the formative period of European settlement. (d) In addition, these objects also act as mnemonic images of previous performances of the Penitentes’ rituals in this community both as personally experienced and as recalled by older relatives and friends. PHANTASIA The normal modern meaning of fantasy as an unreal, fantastic or delusionary image in the mind loses much of the rich dynamism to be found in the classical notion of phantasia, wherein there is a tension between skillfully produced perspectives that give the illusion of depth, distance and incorporation into movement and time and those images generated in the mind as memories, mnemonic signals and personifications or embodiments of abstract ideas.

To the more literal-minded and the Protestant sensibilities that first began to write and speak about the Penitentes in the nineteenth-century, as well as to the more rational and decorous priests sent from France and the northern states of America, the behavior and beliefs of the Penitentes seemed an outrageous throwback to medieval Catholicism. This brotherhood seemed to mark a savage and barbaric manifestation of the worst of unsophisticated folklore because of its indulgence of bloody rites of self-flagellation and auto-crucifixion. In that sense, the Penitentes belonged at once to the so-called “Black Legend” of Spanish colonization — a cruel feudal regime fueled by a fanatical and blood-thirsty Church — and to the racial bigotry associated with denigration of Hispanic culture, especially the supposedly lazy, ignorant and superstitious Mexicans inherited along with the territory of northern Mexico. But in a more generous perspective, the performance of ritual acts of penetentia, including flagellation and crucifixion, seem no more perverse than analogous ceremonies of Holy Week or Corpus Christi Day in Spain, Portugal, Italy or other Catholic nations. The folk imagination, as it were, conceives of the 335

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sacred events in visual, tactile, and psychological terms as part of a much wider concern for the spiritual and social bonding of the community, a community at once marginalized by neglect from central authorities of Church and State, before and after the United States gained dominion over the region, and at the same time driven to an intense secrecy necessitated by hostile and scornful groups of more recent settlers to this same part of the world. This secrecy moreover is a complex of traditional strategies acquired during the course of centuries and endowed already with its own mystical qualities. LUDIBRIUM There are two main senses to this Latin term ludibrium which in general means a kind of satirical or mocking play. (a) In the first sense, when used by certain Romans to describe the Passion of Christ, it describes the whole process of violent humiliation inflicted upon Jesus from the mock trials through the procession in the streets of Jerusalem to the Crucifixion itself. (b) In the second sense, which comes into focus after the Resurrection and glorification of the Christ, the whole episode mocks the vain and futile behavior of the Sadducees and the Romans who believe they have triumphed over the foolish band of messianists proclaiming their leader to be King of the Jews. These several Latin rhetorical terms can help us gain a new perspective on the Penitentes, a way of seeing and appreciating their beliefs and practices without denigrating them or dismissing them as a minor folkloric phenomenon in the American southwest. They represent, not only a legitimate mode of Catholicism in their region that is understandable and appropriate in their time, but a very interesting variation — one can hardly call it a “relic” — of Christianity that seems to have been one of several modalities possible before the codification of the Roman Church in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Through both marginalization and isolation, these small communities of Mexican settlers were forced by circumstances to create their own local religious organizations to carry out spiritual, liturgical and social functions either not available at all from official ecclesiastical or civil authorities or offered only in hostile, insulting terms. In a letter written to Friedrich Nicolai on 26 May 1769, Ephraim Lessing spoke of the difference between natural and arbitrary signs and of the poetic devices that play them off against one another. Plato and Aristotle, according to Murray Krieger, had grasped after these terms in order to argue the case for the primacy either of drama or epic as mimetic modes, Plato seeing imitation 336

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as a negative phenomenon thus condemning tragedy for being a doubled deception and Homer, when at least he speaks in his own voice, as less so, while Aristotle seeing imitation as a more positive phenomenon praised drama for creating speaking characters without the need, as Homer was forced to be, of a narrator to keep the verbal text moving through time and space. In the eighteenth century, during the Enlightenment, Lessing, with his north European bent towards Puritanism in regard to language, could distinguish between a natural-sign discourse containing words that referred to the real, material world of human activities and arbitrary-sign language containing symbolic, allegorical and hieroglyphic words whose reference points were in the moral, psychological or spiritual realms of discourse. If we pay careful attention to this extreme argument from the Protestant Aufklarung and set it against the matrix of Catholic Baroque sensibility in which the Penitentes operate, we may be able to pierce the fog of hostile mystification which has surrounded the performances of the brotherhood’s Holy Week rituals of self-flagellation and crucifixion. Of the poetic forms that stress the arbitrary signs, Lessing tells his friend Nicolai, . . . all genres of that use only these means must be looked upon as lower genres of poetry, and the highest genre of poetry will be that which transforms the arbitrary signs completely into natural signs. That is dramatic poetry; for in it words cease to be arbitrary signs, and become natural signs. (Lessing cited in Krieger, p. 50)

We must make some nuanced adjustment and substitutions here in order to come to grips with the Penitentes are doing. While their performance is drama, it is a ritual in which they collapse several arbitrary frames of reference — a celebratory memorial and symbolic imitation of the Passion of Christ, a transposed re-enactment of the Eucharist and penitential exercise on and in their own bodies, and a dramatic transposition of the sanctos and retablos depicting in paint on wood or canvas and carved into wooden objects that assist the worshipper recall, focus on, and internalize the sacred events in history and in the mass. By inscribing the action — the symbolic and real wounds of Christ, the arbitrary code of ecclesiastical iconography — on to their own persons and by their own hands, these iconic things and acts become natural signs, signs that now also represent themselves, insofar as each penitent repeats5 for and on himself the sufferings of Jesus Christ. Krieger extrapolates further from Lessing’s epistle to bring out further the implications of the German theorist’s distinction between drama and symbolic poetry: 5

In one sense, this repetition may be taken as an introjection, an intensification in personal terms, and a mnemonic self-creation; but in another sense it can be seen as a form of midrashic enhancement, redefinition, and application of textual meaning and/ or memory into the bonded collective self of the group (the brotherhood).

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Because of its peculiar mode of representation — flesh-and-blood creatures (actors) impersonating made-up poetic creatures (characters) who represent real people (objects of imitation) — drama converts literature’s words into the moving pictures of a visual art. The words of a play, though arbitrary, like all words, are an imitation of an actual speech act: the words of a dramatic speech constitute a natural representation — in the mouth of a natural-sign speaker who speaks like his or her real counterpart — of our use of words as arbitrary signs. Thus the arbitrary signs of language, like the arbitrarily named fictional creatures who speak them, function within a mimetic operation in which actions and speeches are viewed by us as natural signs. In this way [reverting to Lessing’s own words in the letter] “words . . . become natural signs of arbitrary objects [Dinge].” (Krieger, pp. 50–51).

The Penitentes acting out in their own performances and on their own persons the bloody events of Easter Week are more than ordinary actors playing fleshand-blood characters: their bloodied flesh identifies them as natural signs and as arbitrary symbols representing a mythico-historical action which is symbolically represented by sacraments and by sacred icons in the Church. Those static images, however, are transformed into the moving-picture of the penitential rite, which is accompanied by liturgical hymns sung by the procession of brothers. Instead of dialogue between actors impersonating characters in an arbitrary scenario that refers historically and symbolically to the Passion of Christ, the songs chanted by the processors on the way to the site of the faux-crucifixion frame a different kind of speech: the agonized moans of the brothers who suffer the bloody violence of the ritual. That inarticulate speech is like the pain itself, the metonymic cut between the present ritual occasion and the historical and mythic event it imitates — as well as the Eucharistic rite it stands in place of. This performance also collapses the distinction between (missing) priests who perform the Eucharist on behalf of the congregation-audience and the worshippers who both view the mass and communicate within its structured, dramatic format. Rather than a ritual drama, such as a Corpus Christi Day Processional performance or a Mystery Play, in which actors impersonate the characters of the biblical story of the Passion, pretending to inflict and to receive the violent sufferings of Christ, the Penitentes’ ritual embodies and internalizes the real infliction of pain and humiliation. The blood that flows is metonymic and synechdochic, that is, it is continuous with the sacramental blood that Jesus shed on the way to Calvary and on the Cross and it recreates and embodies the symbolic blood of the mass, analogously to the way in which the priest performs the miraculous turning of Eucharistic wine and wafer into the Real Presence of Christ’s blood and flesh. It is not that the penitent brothers believe themselves to become Jesus or to enact a priestly mass in their processional actions. The physical pains of flagellation and the agony of the crucifixion are part of the sufferings of Christ at Calvary. Those who whip the penitents and who tie the brother to the cross are also 338

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witnesses of a symbolic (arbitrary) scene of sacred drama and participants in the Eucharistic miracle. But who could have performed these actions, imitating Christ in His Passion, collapsing the distinction between a rhetorical image or even a quasijudicial superstitious ritual of self-transformation? Unlike the performers in English and West European Passion plays, where human actors often mix with puppets, paintings and statues, creating various illusions of the historical, moral, sacramental and figurative meanings of the Crucifixion — and only rarely, inadvertently or without permission of the regulatory agency in charge of the performance — does anyone really shed blood or suffer more than symbolic pains. Memorial actions became increasingly abstracted and allegorical during the transition from Catholic to Protestant rites. And imitations of Christ turned to inward experiences rather than outward in semi- or quasi-liturgical actions.

MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES, CAREERS AND STRATEGIES OF DISSIMULATION It has been shown that psychologically Jews treated their past as an “open book,” subject to hermeneutics, and thereby revision and change. The relation of the sinner to his past is not a schizophrenic rupture with his former transgressions, but a confrontation and new representation of the sin. In this manner, sins and offenses are transformed into something positive. “At the rank where the repentant stands,” taught the rabbis [Berakhot 34b), “the perfect righteous cannot stand.” — José Faur6

It is time to take an extended look at one of the complex and confusing characters who exemplify some of the characteristics of the Marrano or CryptoJewish mind, with the fuzziness of his designation part of the story. Though a poet, playwright, and intellectual, Antonio Enríquez Gómez7 shares with his less educated and more worldly-wise fellows among the New Christians a similar range of social strategies and unconscious tics that mark this kind of person — and personality. Gómez is generally recognized as a complex and 6 7

José Faur, Oedipal Paul, “Preliminary Remarks,” Section IV, pp. 20–21, forthcoming. Israel S. Révah, Antonio Enríquez Gómez: un écrivain marrane (v. 1600–1663), traductions des sources espagnoles par Michèle Escamilla-Colin and Béatrice Perez. Edition de Carsten L. Wilke. (Paris: Péninsules/Chandeigne, 2003). Also see Wilke’s magisterial Jüdisch-christliches Doppelleben im Barock. Zur Biographie des Kaufmanns und Dichters Antonio Enríquez Gómez (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1994).

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exemplary seventeenth- century poet known to Christian audiences as Don Fernando de Zárate.8 But this ambiguous character lived more than just a double life9 as a Crypto-Jew, with his public face showing a Christian identity and his neshoma or soul manifesting a secret affinity for his ancestral faith. Insofar as he also reveals a highly-polished and multi-faceted poetic achievement under his two names and in France as well as in Spain, one may say that Gómez is more than the sum of his two parts, masks, literary careers or multiple personalities, or, in a different set of terms, that his Jewish self, as distinct from his formal Judaism or his nominal Christianity, displays qualities larger than either the two personae he constructs in his artistic works. It has been a mystery through most of modern scholarly history to discover “the real” man behind these poetic masks. Carsten Wilkes narrates the gripping tale of Israel Révah’s tracking, as in a roman policier, the footsteps of this everelusive (and illusive) poet of two panim in one person: Is he a historical character rather than a figment of literary imagination or romantic mythology? What he certainly is, is a major figure in the history of both Spanish and of Sephardic literature. To be sure, Antonio Enríquez Gómez remains an emblematic character in the history of Sephardic and Marrano tradition because of his romantic life and his sustained ambiguity. Moreover, like so many of his coreligionists in the nation of Portuguese Jews converted to Roman Catholicism during the crisis of the fifteenth century, and thus working within the cultural apparatus we have called a counter-contraption to evade and taunt the Inquisition, he was more than an evasive intellectual, a witty poet and a self-enacting playwright, but also a successful traveling merchant, that is, a vagrant, migrating character moving from place to place, syncretic space to syncretic space. The historical record shows that Antonio Enríquez Gómez, for most of his life and during his many travels, was able to cover his tracks sufficiently to keep the Inquisition’s spies and informers from identifying him as a judaizer. Like others of his ilk, such as Miguel de Barrios,10 he “perpetuated his heritage by practicing dissimulation and syncretism,”11 and for this reason it is facile to speak of a dichotomy in his biography or bibliography. His inherited and self-conscious Jewishness was not merely hidden under a cloak of public Christianity; his Catholic persona fit around this secret identity in a complex suite of ambiguities, double-entendres, and vague displacements. Baroque mirrors 8

9

10 11

Timothy Oleman, ed. and trans., Marrano Poets of the Seventeenth Century: An Anthology of the Poetry of João Pinto Delgado, Antonio Enríquez Gómez, and Miguel de Barrios (Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1982), Chapter 2, pp. 137–218. There is a common mistake of calling such an ambiguous mind or person with multiple personalities “schizophrenic”. See my Masks in the Mirror, Chapter 5. Révah, Antonio Enríquez Gómez p. 19.

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reflected and refracted his image, distorted the contours of his appearance into an amorphotic illusion. His Catholicism, too, was not merely a dead-weight or coat of iron hypocrisy, but very much a religion he could reshape from within to use as a creative inspiration. Both religious masks, as it were, converged in the formulation of his Spanish character, one in which both Christians and CryptoJews could often act against the persecutory and intolerant features of Church and State by drawing on a shared heritage of conviviencia and an Erasmian humanistic approach to the real world of political and commercial affairs. Even before the crucial 1490s, converted Jews, with varying degrees of religious sincerity and intensity, were intermarrying with and assimilating into all ranks and professions of Iberian society, so that in almost any confrontation between conservative and liberal forces it was likely that individuals were, if not related by actual family ties, then closely, even intimately known to one another. This could be in commerce, education, civil or court service, or religion — right up to the top of the Holy Office itself. Persons with a strong Jewish sense of identity who felt alienated from Iberian culture and wished to live in a more exclusive halachic manner would find means to escape the Lands of Idolatry and rejoin the rabbinical community. Others who could not separate out their Jewishness from their Spanish identity searched for ways and means to stay within a familiar and seemingly advanced Iberian civilization, rather than crossing over to strange, threatening and primitive cultures in North Africa and the Levant, nor even to perhaps even stranger and more uncanny Catholic and Protestant nations on the other side of the Pyrenees. One of the refrain in critics of Spain, from Italian politicians to Erasmus and other liberal reformers in the northern lands, was that Spanish culture was too Jewish. Therefore, surprising as it may seem to us, from the comfort of the postEnlightenment world, those concealed Jews who chose to remain — or to return to Spain or Portugal, or to live in their overseas territories — need to be seen in a different way than scholars have usually assumed; and this should be inclusive of the many conversos and their children who, when finally confronted with the ultimate choice, declared their Jewish faith as they were martyred in an autodafe — in other words, choosing to die damned within the Dead Law of Moses rather than within the bosom of Mother Church. This final decision in extremis which cut them off from the somewhat mitigated comfort of garroting instead of being burnt alive at the stake was a radical defiance of the Inquisition, but not necessarily of the whole of Iberian civilization. Indeed, it may be a last gasp of faith in the kind of Judaism that had developed among Sephardim — and among them only. This was a different kind of Sanctification of the Name, kiddush ha-Shem, mythologized in German Pietism, hassidus ashkenaz, a heroic but very questionably Jewish public killing of one’s wife, children and self. Here the sanctification came through acceptance of the pains inflicted by an unbearable persecuting religion seen as anomalous and insulting to the 341

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ideals of conviviencia. This martyrdom modeled itself on the exemplary deaths of talmudic rabbis and teachers under Roman tyranny. When possible, however, most Crypto-Jews avoided this extreme of martyrdom and they did all they could to avoid denunciation and arrest and yet, that happening, they did all they could to to confound their interrogators, using their collective experience and intelligence. In many ways, they had been preparing against this eventuality all their lives. Schemes to coordinate stories among family and friends likely to be summoned at the same time, including recognition that under duress individuals would have to reveal the names of fellow judaizers, as well as attempts to name persons who were dead or already secure overseas before denouncing those near and dear. There were also plans to forestall judgments by the inquisitors by admission of minor sins and ambivalent beliefs. During long periods of incarceration, friends and associates rehearsed techniques of communication, increasingly refined to coded messages hidden inside fruit, inscribed on nuts, scratched on platters and utensils, and banged on walls. Knowing, too, that cell-mates were likely to be plants and provocateurs, carefully concocted statements were made that could test the trustworthiness of these strangers or confuse the recipients of this information. For all that, unfortunately, the denunciations by malsines would often create untenable situations from which the New Christian accused of judaizing could not escape and then there would be the inevitable conclusion. So-called polillios, moles and double-agents, acting on their own to curry favour with the authorities or under instruction by the inquisitors and their officers, were often able to trick the prisoners, since, as we mentioned earlier, the two contraptions were not only run by persons who could have been friends, relatives and business associated at some earlier time, but also precisely geared to have the cogs of one turn the wheels of the other. It probably took a long time for the New Christians to figure out that in the long run they were playing a losing game, and that then the only remaining options were, if in the custody of the Holy Office, to put aside all pretences and confront it with a proud declaration of Jewish faith and adherence to the Law; or, if possible, prior to arrest or during some period of “reconciliation”, to escape altogether from these Lands of Darkness. Yet again, we have to backtrack sufficiently to recognize what is in the historical evidence: despite arrests and convictions which led to humiliating loss of wealth and status, sometimes also with long periods of servitude in the galleys of the fleet, New Christians did not always run away from Iberia or the Mediterranean and overseas dominions of the Empire. Israel Révah, in the collection of university lectures edited and annotated by Carston Wilke, attempts to follow the history of several families through a number of generations, rather than focusing on any specific individuals who come to the attention of the Inquisition. This allows a picture to emerge that is quite different from what is usually imagined or constructed in the heroic 342

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version of Sephardic history, since the various members of such families, generation after generation, play a series of distinct and diverse roles in relation to their shared Jewish past and experiences as New Christians. Unfortunately, as much information as Révah and Wilke do provide, it is not really possible to develop a very clear appreciation of the part played by women and children and hence of the domestic politics involved in the preservation of secret Jewishness other than in the traces left on the statements and actions of adults. What is striking, however, is the relative coherence of the families qua families as carriers, as it were, of this disguised identity. History here should not be reduced to the experience of a single individual, even when remarkable, as with de Barrios or Gómez. This factor becomes most evident when we come to the generally anonymous founders of the Penitentes in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The few men and women who now step forward to claim their identity as children of anousim cannot always trace back in a detailed way their ancestors for more than a few generations and can make only vague comments about the settlers who traveled to the northern fringes of New Spain. The precise dynamics of keeping alive a Jewish memory remains beyond our or their means, but that the memory did not die out is manifest; and this fact must be recognized with the allowance that, as Proust has shown, memories are most powerful and unchanged when “forgotten” and least trustworthy when “remembered” and thus mixed up with current fears and anxieties. José Faur calls this a miracle. Returning now to our remarks on what Révah, Wilke and other scholars have discovered about the New Christian tradition, the clandestine transmission of this secret and sometimes forgotten identity does mark certain Sephardic families who stayed behind in Spain and Portugal, and this suggests that there are distinct qualities in the social relations, child-rearing practices, and educational techniques that set such families apart from others, the others in which their Jewish past is much more quickly and decisively attenuated and was eventually forgotten in the sense of becoming inert and inoperative. In this regard, Wilke cites the four factors that are involved in following a family’s history: 1. 2. 3. 4.

the sincerity of adherence to religious faith, whether Christian or Jewish; the responses to the effects of inquisitorial repression of Crypto-Judaism; the force of attachment to one’s native soil; and the economic-social imperative. (p. 43).

The editor of Révah’s lectures then makes a far more significant remark that carries the discussion beyond these vague categories and into the place where psychological and literary analyses can operate more freely. Wilke says, in relation to the subject of Révah’s research, 343

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Mais l’image d’un personnage kafkaïen du xviie siècle, annihilé dans les rouages d’un système totalitaire, ou celle d’un libéral en révolte contre les tyrans nous montrent déjà par leur charge émotionnelle qu’elles ne sont pas pour autant plus objectives que celle un Juif persécute a cause de sa fidélité ancestrale. Le doute quant à certains idéalisations de ce type nous a fait insister ailleurs sur les côtés moins sympathiques de ce héros: sa connivence avec les mouchards du Saint-office en 1634–1637, son activité dans la traite atlantique des Noirs en 1642–1645, sa fraude commerciale à l’encontre des ses associés judéo-portugais en 1649, puis le fanatisme catholique de certaines se ses pièces des années 1650. Ainsi la fluctuation opportuniste de ses jugements sur le régime absolutiste de Richelieu et de Mazarin fait penser qu’Enriquez Gomez n’était pas aussi idéaliste que cela.12

Certainly the idealizing, sentimentalizing image of the Marrano should now be well and truly put aside. The question does remain, however, as to how far we can read back into such a character of the seventeenth-century traits signified by the epithet “Kafkaesque,” as this too may be a distortion of the more hardheaded personality in question. Whether he is writing as a Christian or as a Jew, Antonio Enríquez Gómez comes across with an intensity characteristic of each as a person of Iberian seventeenth-century culture, with all the faults and illiberal qualities a modern reader finds distasteful. This makes us wonder, therefore, just how much the mask of one or the other religious identities is merely a superficial public display and how much it is, as with tribal masks, a transformation of the urges embodied in the ritual performed. If Franz Kafka is the wrong reference point to which the reader tries to find his or her bearings when suddenly finding the craft of scholarly interpretation all at sea, it may partly be because we are taking the Prague-based German-Jewish author too much at his own face value — or that assigned by some superficial critics: that is, rather than recognizing in him an analogue to the multi-faceted Sephardic writer — the one inhabiting normally or normatively incompatible universes of linguistic, literate, and spiritual activity. At the same time, readers do need to shift from contemporary literary expectations and cultural norms, born in the breakdown of nineteenth-century certainties and honed in the enormities of the great wars and genocidal enterprises of the twentieth century, and, instead, try to imagine the Spanish Baroque sensibilities and the psychological anxieties provoked by the dislocations of faith in the seventeenth century. Having said that, we still find the focus on the family histories as rendered by Révah and Wilke unsatisfying insofar as these exercises offer almost no evidence of infantile and childhood experiences or of the adult parents’ anxieties in regard to their progeny. It is no longer valid (if it ever were outside a strictly Marxist regime) to argue that commercial, political, intellectual or spiritual crises are mere illusions or epiphenomena emanating from the realities of childrearing, 12

Révah, Gómez, p. 47.

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parenting, and gendered domestic experiences.13 That would be simplistic and absurdly dismissive of adult will and decision-making. Still, insofar as any facts can be adduced to match with modern clinical studies and field reports, the raising of children to be Crypto-Jews, with both components of Catholic education and Jewish learning, should not be reduced to what is explicitly or consciously taught, and must include implicit, emotion-laden, often unconsciously determined factors, factors that may at best leave only vague, convoluted and incomplete traces. After all, what we are searching for is precisely what the individuals and families involved sought to hide — and what the familiares and malsines were primed to discover and denounce. On the one hand, however, anecdotal information today seems to suggest that Spanish and Latin American childrearing practices were softer than those practiced in Anglo-Saxon and other Protestant nations, or even in France. Rather than intruding into children’s lives with rigid moral codes of conduct and disciplining them to regular patterns of behaviour, the Spanish or Mexican family supposedly indulged the child. On the other hand, such relative terms become nugatory without a further consideration of what may have been normative in Sephardic families prior to the pogroms, persecutions, and expulsions, as well as the waves of mass conversion. It must be presumed that these events, traumatic to adults, were full of stress for children, and this stress would be passed on to their own children and so on seriatum. However, another way of looking at the situation — the psychohistorical approach — finds in the intrusive mode of childrearing that became dominant during and after the Reformation an advance towards understanding and respecting a child’s special needs and qualities, while the so-called indulgent parenting produced in the next stage of progressive developments is actually a sentimentalized view of neglect and even abandonment. Increased stress on the role of the Virgin Mary as an ideal mother reveals, when we examine what she actually says in visions to her devotees and what children are told she stands for by parents and clerical teachers, that the world is filthy and vicious, and particularly that young children who lack control of their bodily functions and have no shame are vessels of sinfulness targeted by demons.14 It is therefore necessary for parents and other care-givers in the community to discipline these poison-containers, purge them of their bad habits, and surround them with protective care. Traditional Jewish upbringing in the Middle Ages, while far from indulgently soft and gentle, nevertheless was advanced towards intrusive parenting, hence 13

14

Yet we will be discussing these socio-biological and psycho-cultural aspects of personality formation in Chapter VII. However, as we shall discuss in the last several chapters, this kind of “demonic possession” of the land can be transfigured to a more subversive idea, derived partly from Platonic doctrine and from rabbinic discourses, of the daemonic intermediary, intellectual messengers, shaliachim, angels or “familiars” of the counter-contraption.

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the stress on education, but also tinged with a need to protect and care for the fragility and innocence of infancy because Jews were a precariously placed minority culture whose main strength was, after internalization of moral codes and intellectual concepts, the mutual loyalty of the family, extended from the household to the Jewish community at large.15 Furthermore, Jewish parenting, based on shared efforts of mothers and fathers, at home and in the synagogue or study-house, tended to stress tactile reinforcements: rather than swaddling and abandoning babies, infants were carried by mothers or nurses, breastfed in the household, and treated well. To a certain degree, as the response literature reveals, parents were advised to calm their own anxieties by caressing, dandling and playing with their children. Corporal punishment was certainly part of the overall communal regime of discipline but not necessarily a harsh control over its smallest and weakest members. Indeed little boys and girls attending synagogue with their father were usually indulged, unless their behavior became so unruly as to interfere with worship or study. Children participated in family celebrations in the house and its close environs, sometimes, as at Passover seder, playing a key role in triggering and organizing the order of the festive occasion. Did this attitude prevail in the periods of crisis? After the mass conversions, families attempted to maintain their close-bonded status and to provide concentrated education on their children, but, at the same time, there were now centrifugal forces at play, driving members of the family out into the Christian community and culture and enforcing contrary emotional and intellectual modes of behaviour to children inside the domestic circle. Given the kind of information available, it is easier to see these changes in the relationship of adults, especially men to women than parent to child. Wilke, following Révah, indicates that women played important roles in the transmission of Jewishness, sometimes, naturally, in the teaching of songs and prayers and the direction of family rituals, and sometimes in the substitution of age-old female customs and beliefs for those which in the past were considered central, either because synagogue attendance is impossible or because men’s public safety requires a more subordinate, low-profile participation, and now emerge as constitutive by default. In addition, women’s leadership in household religion in its Jewish manifestation would now develop in ways previously stunted or totally repressed, with a range of consequences on the domestic politics of male-female relationships, something perhaps more acute in homes where Iberian machismo takes on a strange ambience insofar as it is at once 15

The following discussion follows my article “The Radical Transformation of Jewish Childrearing after the First Two Crusades: A Problem in Multi-Generational Post-Traumatic Stress” Journal of Psychohistory 30:2 (2002) 164–189; the review essay “Where Were The Kids?” a Review of Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, eds, The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800 in Mentalities/Mentalités 19:2 (2005) 67–77. and the relevant passages in Masks in the Mirror.

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a concomitant of assimilation into the dominant society, a weighted defence mechanism for Jewish men stripped of their rabbinically-sanctioned roles as tradents of talmudic knowledge and defenders of the ancestral faith in public debates, and a major irritant in the customary balance between paternal and maternal activities in regard to such matters as sexual purity, care and education of children, and guardianship of the family’s honour. Révah and Wilke emphasize the dangers of the malsines, the denigrators and denunciators of judaizing, but seem to neglect the other points where the individual and family are vulnerable to the Holy Office’s attentions. These dangers would centre not just on neighbours and servants who often colluded with formal familiars of the Inquisition and thus made all family activities subject to jealous and fanatic eyes and ears; but there would also be the possible eruption of rivalry and jealousy within the family itself, all sorts of petty occasions when an incautious word or act of spite could lead to a major disaster for all concerned. Above all, the presence of children in the household always spelled the need for suspicion and caution since these little sons and daughters could in all innocence speak inappropriately, act out some forbidden family custom, or choose to please a teacher, priest, or seductive stranger by revealing some secret. When children moved out of a naive stage of living without comprehension of the duplicitous game played out around them and into adolescence with its sense of idealism and self-righteousness, as well as rebellious cynicism, the dangers would probably have increased for everyone concerned, especially as these still immature young people would come under the sway of teachers and religious leaders. It is also important to recall that at this time in European history what we consider teenagers were often apprenticed, married, and expected to take part in key decision-making activities, and yet they were still psychologically and emotionally lacking in full control over their emotions and tempers — and often unable to comprehend the significance of the threats all around in a hostile, suspicious society. More than elsewhere in Iberian society, where everyone, Old Christian as well as New, more or less learned to be wary of Inquisitorial agents and had a more or less developed sense of tensions between the streams of tolerance and fanaticism that flowed through the body politic, the Crypto-Jewish home was a site of profound and disruptive feelings. On the whole, it is difficult to discover documentary evidence detailing emotional and attitudinal patterns in either Sephardic Jewish families before the crises of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and to sketch out some normative scenes of Christian domestic life into which newly converted Jews were expected to take part, not only when they married Old Christians but also when they sought to establish proper public identities. We certainly risk falling into the trap of superstition in the sense that José Faur points out: believing one can imagine in vivid detail the scene of an event outside one’s own normal experience, whether in the historical 347

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past or in some distant and exotic place of otherness. Yet this is a chance we are willing to take: here are the indisputable facts — the harshness of life, and the cruelties displayed in the operations of the Holy Office or in the establishment of overseas colonies — with mass killings of Native Indians and enslavement of Black Africans as telling incidents — all this suggests violent, abusive childhoods that numbed people’s abilities to empathize with the other and repressed rage that manifest itself in brutal policies. Of course, it may be, as Iberian apologists like to point out, whatever seems abhorrent in the so-called Black Legend of Spanish colonialism or in the tortures of the Inquisition can be found elsewhere in Europe, while there were perhaps more counter-currents of Erasmian tolerance and eirinism in Iberia than to the north. However, what is proved in this argument16 is mostly what psychohistorians like Lloyd deMause argue, is that all of Christian Europe was fixated at a stage of primitive child-rearing practices. As I have already hinted, my own research suggests that Jewish families were somewhat more advanced and so traditionally produced fewer abused and violated children, making home life more harmonious and peaceful. These aspects of Jewish domesticity were for the most part not consciously determined or discussed, and so could remain, after the mass conversions and inter-marriages, as “family customs”, not marked as Jewish or even strange until observed by the Inquisition as evidence of judaizing. No doubt the Jewishness17 at the level of a somatic transmission would not remain the same under the dual assault of assimilation to an outwardly Christian set of social practices and of transformed politically-charged gender relations and the sense of trustworthiness or untrustworthiness in the relations of parent to child and vice versa. What Révah and Wilke’s book on Antonio Enríquez Gómez implies by its narrative of generation after generation of Crypto-Judaism, with individuals and branches of the family turning on one another with a great deal of regularity, is that such families could not be normal, either by Catholic or by Jewish standards, let alone by the dominant traditions of conviviencia in El-Andalus in the Middle Ages. But while Sepharad, the homeland of the Sephardic Jews in Iberia, may be limited to Andalusia, it can also be extended to include a series of other Spains, some geographical and some cultural and even some psychological. As Peter Cole puts it in his “Introduction” to a new translation of poems by Ibn Gabirol: 16

17

Proof here is rhetorical rather than historical in the strict sense, the basis of the argument resting on analogies, syllogisms and other figurative constructs. Again, we stress this is a matter of Jewishness — of a more emotional, subjective quality of character — rather than of Judaism, which is a matter of legal (halachic) status and intellectual understanding.

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There is the Golden Age of Jewish poetry, the period of unrivaled Hebrew literary achievement, with the occasional story of political success: the Spain of Jewish pride, which emerged with miraculous suddenness in the late tenth century, one of the abiding mysteries of Jewish history; — there is the Spain of the Jewish “neo-lachrymose historians,” in which all paths lead to expulsion or worse; — there is the elegiac Palestinian equivalent, in which Andalusia equals the abandoned campsite of the beloved in the pre-Islamic qasida, equals Palestine and the lost paradise of Islamic power, splendor, and culture; — and there is the Andalusian rainbow coalition, the Spain of conviviencia and “interfaith utopia,’ where Arabs, Berbers. Iberians, Slavs, and Jews lived — or seemed to live — in relative comfort side by side;18 — there is the enchanted Spain of romantic engravings and Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra; — there is a melodramatic Spain of the Arab menace and sensual delight, the bodiceripper Spain . . . — and there is the Spain-of-the-past as imagined literary future, the Andalusia of poets such as Mahmoud Darwish, the eminent Palestinian writer . . . 19

In other words, it was not just that a Catholic self and a Jewish self in this poet jockeyed for dominance or in a single individual or in just one family, but that the different personae were always shifting and changing in dominant religious allegiance, degree of sincerity, and state of tension vis-à-vis those around them. In the specific case of Antonio Enríquez Gómez, given the regrettable loss of so much of his openly Jewish writings, it is hard to generalize too much, but it does seem that most of this oscillation took place behind the scenes, or at least between the lines. How far the Christian literature he produced should be taken as an autobiographical reflection of the author’s private life remains highly problematical, in the sense that the strong, even fanatical Catholic tone may be as much part of Gómez’s disguise as it is a sincere statement of his beliefs in the time and place of his writing these poems and plays. Seeing him as cynical and sincere at the same time may be one of the key features of his — and many other Marranos’ — Baroque personalities. Révah himself begins the Introduction to his collected Sorbonne lectures by stressing the family-based history he must write of Crypto-Judaism. This means both a multi-generational approach and an examination of all branches possible of the family from which the subject Antonio Enríquez Gómez stems. This extended family over seven generations contains at least eighty members 18 19

Cp. David Shasha’s “Levantine Option” discussed in Chapter I. Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly) Cole’s seven dream-versions of Spain leave out those of El Cid and the Reconquista, of the Inquisition and the Statutes of Blood Purity, of Don Quixote and the picaresque heroes and heroines of a subversive Marrano literature, and so on.

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who suffered in extremis from the persecutions of the Holy Office. Sometimes, given the paucity of the archival sources — though they are greater than one would assume thanks to the record-keeping of the Inquisition — only the barest information is known of an individual or a couple and their children: names, but not always; dates and places of birth, yet incompletely; and occasions when they were denounced, arrested, and interrogated by the Holy Office, when these particular persons fall into this public category. Some commercial data is also known, both when the people involved are in France and in Spain, and a few literary allusions and remarks in dedications, prefaces, and the occasional accessus ad auctores. The task Révah set himself was, though, not merely to sketch out as fully as possible the family tree of the author, but to investigate as well the nature of Marrano tradition and its “literature of dissimulation” (p. 89). What he wishes to do in his research is therefore more than to prove that Antonio Enríquez Gómez and Don Fernando de Zérate are one and the same man — we hesitate to say persona, figure or character since these are highly loaded terms of cultural constructs of self, public and private: the task is to understand how both writers can exist and operate within Spanish culture in the seventeenth century. It would be so much easier if one could simply conclude that Don Fernando de Zérate is merely the name or pseudonym of the last part of the career of Antonio Enríquez Gómez.20

When we read closely the genealogical history of the family of Antonio Enríquez Gómez, we are exposed to “un movement religieux secret qui a duré près de trois siècles.”21 On the one hand, not every individual in this long period can be considered a Crypto-Jew. On the other hand, the family as such can be identified as secretly Jewish. Here is where we come to the idea of the contraption again. It has been pointed out that among Jews no single individual, with perhaps the outstanding exception of Maimonides himself, could be expected to fulfill all 613 mitzvot, know every tractate of the Mishnah by heart, and command with intellectual precision and judicial perspicacity each decision within the rabbinical canon. Yet each man or woman, insofar as he or she does perform some or even just one of these precepts of the Torah, contributes to the overall sanctification of the world, that is, adds a significant bit of the total cumulative effect. Thus the Gómez family seen as a cumulative whole over many generations exemplifies a form of continuity — not perfectly coherent or consistent, but strong enough to put each individual on the spot whenever he or she is faced by the probability of denunciation to the Inquisition or the necessity of providing documentary evidence of purity of 20 21

Révah, Gómez, p. 89. Ibid., p. 97.

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blood, a virtual since qua non of successful professional careers or marriage in Spain. As we read page after page of the evidence accumulated by Révah, and then subsequently expanded on by Wilke, it is clear that indeed most of the known and named members of the family at one time or another in their lives were faced with this problem of self-identification. Though Révah provides background explanations to make the interaction of accused and accusers understandable within the context of seventeenth-century life, contraption engaged with counter-contraption, it is not clear why some individuals make one choice, and others a different one; nor how the family at any given point decides to educate its children to be secret Jews or to get them out of the household, into a convent or monastery, and when to trust sons enough to send them to be trained as priests or physicians or to travel abroad as agents of the family business. Occasionally, in an apparently forced confession to the inquisitors the accused names the family member who introduced him to the secret practice of Judaism and more rarely adds at what age this introduction occurred. A few chance remarks also shed some light on the kinds of domestic tensions experienced by the family. For instance, Mari Lopez on 29 November 1516, for instance, told her interrogators that she did not consistently practice her Judaism “parce que sa maison était fréquentée et que son mari était présent. Mais que, si elle en avait eu le loisir, elle aurait [toujours] observé lesdits sabbats, à cause de l’intention qu’elle avait.(p. 120)” It must be assumed that non-Jewish neighbours and business associated frequented the household and that the wife could not trust her husband in regard to her secret Jewishness. Under such conditions, the transmission of Jewish knowledge was carried out “par voie orale clandestine, sans recours à des texts imprimés ou manuscripts.”22 This is the situation in which female knowledge and customs comes to replace or to dominate traditional male knowledge and customs. Such female knowledge and practice no longer supplemented the intellectualized activities of the male head of the household and the family’s representative in the house of study, and to that extent the whole picture produced is truncated, distorted, and legally invalid. However, since other modes of fulfilling the mitzvoth had been made impossible through the destruction of the rabbinical community institutions and the other regulations making criminal the open practice of Judaism, the domestic side of the traditional Jewish life stood for the whole, and this could be seen, at least from one peculiar angle of potentiality, as analogous to the reforms implemented after 69 and 70 CE with the Destruction of the Temple and the cult of priestly sacrifices, when the sages, scribes and remaining Kohanim and Levites gathered together to reconstitute a new kind of religion based on study and displaced priestly rituals from altar to domestic hearth. Above all, when the Romans 22

Révah, Gómez, p. 121.

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burned the national archives stored in the Temple precincts in Jerusalem, the survivors of this disaster had to reconstruct the remaining documents and personal memories into a Morasha with a new kind of legal status capable of sustaining the national and ethical identity of the Children of Israel throughout an indefinite period of exile and dispersion, the Galut. What happened in Spain and Portugal after the 1490s was at once more destructive of the Jewish nation and yet less dangerous, that is, granted that the more terrible undermining of Jewish institutional and ethical-juridical tradition had already occurred during the Maimonidean Controversies. The destruction of Sephardic nationality was more pervasive than the tragedy in Jerusalem in 69 CE because virtually the whole of the previously existent civilization was disrupted and dispersed to other parts of the world, leaving no legal remnants behind. Yet this disaster was less dangerous to the core of Jewishness insofar as refugees expelled from Iberia could, if they wished, rejoin functioning rabbinical communities elsewhere, and there was no major legal impasse to this reconstitution. What did happen, though, was influential for the course of cultural developments and historical consequences. For example, those people who left Sepharad profoundly saddened and discouraged by the previous century of persecutions sought to rationalize their anxieties and fears through the mythologization of Lurianic Kabbalah, climaxing in the fiasco of the Sabbatean experience, with almost all Jews, Sepharidic and Ashkenazi, at least for a few crucial months, swept up in the ecstasy of messianic expectations. For those who chose to stay or return to Iberian jurisdictions, hoping to wear out the storm in hiding, their efforts succeeded when a small remnant managed to pass on the shreds of a national memory for hundreds of years but failed in the long run to impart the key components of the morasha, the national memory: the juridically valid documents of the mitzvoth and the skills and discipline to keep the Law alive as a functioning instrument of national identity. Notice how in the next incident recounted in Révah and Wilke’s book the memory of the laws of kashrut, concerning clean and unclean foods or of observance of the Sabbath, is sustained, but only up to a point. Elivira de Campo recalled that at “onze ans, sa mère lui avait dit de ne pas manger de porc et d’observer le sabbat,”23 suggesting that at least in one household eleven-year-old girls were considered mature enough to be entrusted with the family secrets, and that the mother, in this instance, was the primary vehicle of transmission. These regulations while recollected and passed on in this way — outside of juridically correct channels of conveyance — do not, however, come with any validating legal or historical understanding and are treated by the recipients as talismanic acts, in other words (though these are not the words they would use) mere idolatry. Yet we can see a glimmering of awareness 23

Révah, Gómez, p. 124.

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of this Jewish principle at work in the comment by Dr. A. Ximénez, one of the inquisitors, summing up the confessions he was listening to on 29 May 1588: the knowledge passed on to these little girls was ultra vires, and though in this case it was “leur père . . . a enseigné lesdites pratiques” in instructing the youngest sister the father did not disclose why these practices were necessary; he merely told the child “ces choses-là, sans lui reveller de quelle religion il s’agissait.”24 It would be extremely harsh in the light of subsequent history, when future generations only had these fragments of Jewish information to guide them, to condemn them as outside the Pale of Judaism, just as they were considered by the Church as lost heretics. We can argue, however, that something else was conveyed, albeit silently and invisibly, through the situation itself, including the tensions and anxieties, the concern of the parent to ensure the continuity of the heritage for his children: a virtually somatic sense of Jewishness. At another point in his discussion, Révah speaks of the Marranos as becoming “literally paralyzed by the terror” and as they incriminate each other one after the other to officers of the Inquisition.25 It is not clear as to what he means precisely by “[l]ittéralement paralysés”. In René Girard’s literary anthropology there is such a thing as mimetic violence, referring to the way one act of violence is mirrored in others, as individuals caught in a crisis they cannot manage turn to uncontrolled, trancelike behaviour, and need ritual and myth to manage the emergency conditions that defy normal customs and laws. Rituals “prevent” the excessive outbursts of murderous rage from spreading like a contagion. The violence is contained within the time, place and “aesthetic” or “rhetorical” constraints of the performative occasion. By coming first, before the “natural” reactions of other persons in the vicinity of the primary violent act, the sacrificial moment absorbs the excess energies, focuses them into already known (mythical) narratives, and discharges the potentiality of further violence into a communally acceptable actions and with recognizable and hence limited significance. Nevertheless, such rituals need to be repeated at both regular intervals, when the build-up of tensions has been measured by experience to be sufficient as to require release, or in sporadic times of crisis, as internal breakdowns of normative order or external threats appear at the borders of familiar institutionalized territory are perceived. Insofar as suspected Judaizing families are always on the alert for denunciations and have a certain degree of prepared scenarios to act out to try to limit the impact of the charges and to avoid excessive revelations of names of those who will be arrested and charged themselves, the ritualized confessions and impersonated expressions of penitence may succeed. Yet at the same time, the entire experience of playing 24 25

Révah, Gómez, p. 128. Ibid., pp. 132–133.

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out these rehearsed roles can be seen as comical because they never quite fit with the responsiveness of the other side, the Inquisitors and their agents, who also expect there to be such attempts at deflecting their attention to minor or otiose cases. In addition, when the prepared scenarios are rewritten in captivity, as the arrested judaizers try to make sense out of the unexpected situation they find themselves in — whether because the Holy Office has anticipated too well the ruses and deflections or because other prisoners placed in their cells, act as deliverers of food, or serve as temporary inhabitants during supposed overcrowding (as in weeks immediately prior to a scheduled auto-da-fe) perform their roles too ambiguously to be recognized as agents provocateur, spies or naïve lightning rods to the inquisitorial informants who later quiz them — at such times the new scene that is enacted spontaneously may also seem ludicrous and farcical since the performers now seek, not to escape from the clutches of their tormenters or to avoid final immolation, but to confound, confront and insult the entire contraption trying to grind them down. Instead of being paralyzed by fear, the victims of the inquisition take on a new life and vitality, albeit doing so in a very limited space, and performing their new identities awkwardly for the first time, often repeating their words and actions many times with minor changes as they recognize in themselves images they had never seen or thought of before, that is, perfecting their sense of being Jewish — and yet in a grotesque and tragic parody of what Judaism means. The phrase about paralysis could also refer to a sense of contagion or a folie à deux or à trois or more when the fear of the Inquisition and its tortures becomes overwhelming so as to involve increasing numbers of victims who seek to protect themselves by regressing into infantile states of obedience, seeking to gain the love and protection of the authorities who have threatened them at the expense of their loved ones and close associates. Jean Maisondieu discusses the group dynamics in dysfunctional families in which one or the other individuals is elected to serve as the delegated madman or madwoman, whereas the reality is that all involved are to one degree or another as ill as they are collusive, whether with or without any conscious intentions. In the historical instance hinted at in Révah’s text the psychosis belongs not only to the traumatized family turning each other in to the Holy Office, but to the Inquisition itself and the whole royal, ecclesiastical and civil apparatus that supports its existence. From such a perspective, it may be said that in the Early Modern period Iberian society — Old and New Christian, again — prevented itself from breaking apart into total madness by delegating a small section as the outsiders, the tainted and dangerous others, and that the sign of acceptance of this elective role in Marrano families was their mimetic performance as mad persons. CryptoJudaism could be seen, then, at least partly, as a clinical condition imposed on New Christians at particular moments in their life, rather than a conscious decision by individuals and groups of Marranos to live a double-religious life. 354

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Again, we can see this as a process by which two contraptions mesh into one another and drive the engines of their own destruction. Delegated families therefore are not only regularly picked on to play out this role for the rest of Spanish and Portuguese society but are prepared by a near perpetual state of anxiety to expect the crisis to break out at any moment — and then, to a certain degree at least, to find the anxiety and the expectation an ambiguously treasured and despised constituent of their collective identity. In this way, the argument of someone like Ellis Rivkin, cited by Révah, that those persecuted by the Inquisition were loyal Christians victimized by the structural hatred of the Old Christians and their judaizing, insofar as it had any existence outside the demented mind of the inquisitors, was a suite of merely fortuitous relics of otherwise meaningless Judaism.26 Be that as it may, there are at least two other factors to be taken into account and set against Rivkin’s thesis. (1) One of these factors is the reality of a concealed Judaism in poets like Antonio Enríquez Gómez or Miguel de Barrios, as well as hundreds of other Marranos who escaped from the Lands of idolatry and returned to Judaism in West European cities where this was permissible, thus affirming that their judaizing contra Netanyahu was more than a fortuitous conglomeration of neutral customs. (2) The second factor is that, this time in accord with Netanyahu’s argument, a sufficient number of men and women did indeed learn to be Jews from lists of forbidden practices and beliefs posted in churches and from the animus of friars and priests in mocking Judaism. Thus whatever their knowledge or understanding of Judaism prior to arrest by the Inquisition, this second category of judaizantes or Marranos, once denounced and subject to sustained interrogation and “instruction” in the true meaning of Catholicism, turned the occasion to effect for themselves a commitment to a form of Judaism. As a consequence of their experience in the prisons of Inquisition, they accepted and even sought martyrdom — something which real Crypto-Jews, like Antonio Enríquez Gómez, seemed to avoid with all their strength and wits. Marranism cannot be limited to any one category of faith or madness or technique of coping with the anxieties that all inhabitants of lands subject to the jurisdiction of the Holy Office must have experienced. Thus (3) Marranism, rather than a pejorative synonym for Crypto-Jew, describes the kind of anamorphic picture characteristic of the Baroque period and the baroque mentality. Measuring the intensity or purity of religion against the norms of the Church or the Synagogue will not prove much, except that Marranos will at times conform to prevailing customs and opinions at times and at other times make excessive, fanatical statements, in the case of their Catholicism; while in the case of their Judaism, given the restricted access to rabbinical learning and direction, when inside the domains of Iberian persecution, and granted 26

Révah, Gómez, p. 141.

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their critical and skeptical approach to the unfamiliar rabbinical Judaism they encounter when escaped to more tolerant lands, they will find it very difficult to conform to the halachic rules that prevail in Jewish community life. In either case, therefore, the Marrano may appear distorted and insincere in his or her professions of faith or performance of ritual activities. The Marrano has to be seen, then, as neither incomplete or insincere Jew or Catholic, one masquerading as the other at different periods in the person’s life history, but as something that is neither the one nor the other, and not even some imperfectly balanced combination or odd, grotesque grafting. Marranism itself, insofar as it can be seen as a body of beliefs and practices, does not fit squarely with rabbinical Judaism and articulates itself, intellectually and emotionally, in both an attenuated form and as a new expanding creation. David Gitlitz has documented, in a massive study, the practices and beliefs of Crypto-Judaism from many times and places.27 While helpful in collecting these many testimonies, he nevertheless attempts to grant too much coherence, consistency and intentionality to the phenomenon, confusing it with other modes of secret Judaism, Marranism and Judaizing. Our contention has been throughout this book that Crypto-Judaism and Marranism are not synonymous nor even coextensive. That is why it is important to focus on specific examples and be cautious in drawing analogies or making generalizations. Révah draws attention in his explanatory discussions to how the family of Antonio Enríquez Gómez attempted to hone its knowledge of their lost Judaism. The loss is an attentuation in the sense that its intellectual roots in themselves already broken, fragmented, and incomplete, can barely pass through traumatized memories. Nevertheless as we shall be arguing more assiduously throughout the remaining chapters of this book, it was also possible for these Catholics with Jewish backgrounds — Christians were forced by circumstances of hostility, alienation, intellectual discomfort in the religious and secular cultures developing in Tridentine Spain — to reach back through their own personal educations and consciences to deeper levels of their cognitive and affective formations to tease out of the texts before them (read aloud, preached, imagined in painting, sculpture and ceremony) the most disturbing aspects of that lack of fit between what the purported GrecoLatin narrative of the New Testament was claimed to be about and what was actually there and revealed in a re-judaization and re-hebraiziation of those 27

David M. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Philadelphia, PA and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1996). This book also has been used as an authoritative guide or textbook by the so-called children of anousim in the American Southwest seeking a way to regain their lost Judaic identities and in recognizing features of their family memory and practices to support their claims. As a result, some of the arguments used by these would-be-returning Jews are circular.

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same primary Christian documents.28 In other words, what Dubourg calls “retroversion” becomes a way also of midrashing history. Briefly, then, it was usually working with Christian documents, from the Vulgate Bible through sermons, saints’ lives and iconography that these converso men and women could come into contact with the themes and images of Judaism, or what they desperately conceived to be their Hebraic heritage. Rarely could they gain access to a small number of apologetic digests and compendia written by Jewish authors precisely to instruct the anousim, the forcibly converted ones, in their ancestral faith — materials smuggled across the borders into Iberia or encountered on business trips abroad.29 Yet even such texts, written with the best of intentions usually by returned Sephardim themselves, are necessarily distorted in part because they were written in Spanish, Portuguese or Latin, using terms and concepts therefore tainted by Christian usage, and probably by authors for whom we can presume no sustained or monitored knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic. Such books, too, as Henri Méchoulan has explained, often were composed with little or no prior experience with rabbinical modes of debate and discussion. On occasion, however, when we can see the careers of families over many centuries, we detect hints to explain how the nostalgia for Jewishness sustained itself. This is evident especially when we can observe their occasional and sometimes haphazard encounters with rabbis, synagogues and yeshivot once in every few generations. Such virtually chance meetings came without any continuous opportunity to become aware of how much they were disconnected from Sephardic civilization and Jewish learning. By these means, it is possible to glimpse how certain individuals, more sensitive than siblings and parents to their own vague sense of discomfort and longing for something bred into their earliest experiences as infants and toddlers, embodied in gestures, facial expressions, and tactile relationships, probably beyond the awareness of the primary caregivers and other family members. If anything, the Portuguese Marranos were more in touch with the Jewish world beyond their immediate experiences than the Spanish; and for at least two reasons — (1) they had had a full generation after the mass conversion to consolidate their Crypto-Judaism before an Inquisition was established to root out these heretical ideas; and paradoxically (2) because they were for the most 28

29

Bernard Dubourg, L’invention de Jésus. Vol. 1 “L’Hébreu du Nouveau Testament” (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1987). Based on modern editions, translations and discussions of Jewish exegesis that underpins these Gospels, such as Le Midrash Rabba sur Esther : Esther Rabba , trans. Maurice Mergui (Paris: Nouveaux Savoirs, 2006), the group known as Le Champ du Midrash has been formed and is working its way through both the specific texts and the theoretical and methodological problems associated with this kind of reading that returns to the Hebrew and Jewish phemomena. Cp. Hasdai Crescas, The Refutation of the Christian Principles, trans. Daniel J. Lasker (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992).

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part children and grandchildren of those most orthodox Spanish Jews who crossed over from Castile into Portugal in 1492, while those with other, more worldly skills and aspirations went into exile in West-European Christian or Muslim lands.30 Of the immediate family background of Antonio Enríquez Gómez, two key moments seem to be, first, the crisis that occurred in Rouen — already in relatively safer and more tolerant conditions in France — when malsines, drawn from the ranks of the New Christians in the city, denounced their fellows. These merchants and professionals, when they went back to Spain for various business, family or diplomatic reasons, drew attention to themselves. Their business rivals and suspicious neighbors took advantage of the situation in an effort to gain advancement commercially over rivals in that French city and also to win favourable treatment by the Inquisition in case any negative reports were given against them.31 And then, more surprisingly, the second reason: the return of the poet-playwright to Spain under the disguise of Don Fernando de Zérate, and characteristically but also perhaps extraordinarily successful public career as Crypto-Jewish artist and merchant. The first reason explains the crisis in terms of external forces — denunciation, betrayal, and successful spying. The second reason is less easy to understand because Gómez himself puts himself in harm’s way, returns to Spain to further his career as a Catholic author, and almost seems to court disaster. Of course, there is a significant time gap between his return to Spain and his arrest, a period when he would seem to relax his guard and behave as though he were out of danger. In regard to both cases, Révah presents a host of new information to supplement and correct previous studies of these historical problems. While jealousy and rivalry may be easy enough to understand in regard to the 30

31

Susan A. Handelman writes that Christians look at the Children of Israel and wonder: “Jews are so strangely at home in exile, in the play of signs, in the wanderings of figurative language, and in their own constant physical wanderings: strange literalists who take figures for things, refusing to acknowledge their real referents, remaining under the curse of original sin by refusing to believe in the incarnate word. What collusion with Satan enables them to exist so well in the realm of difference, in the infinite regressions of signs, in the cacophony of words and interpretations, in the endless referentiality of the letter, without the redeeming ultimate referent of the word?” (The Slayers of Moses, p. 120). But like the Marranos who could, albeit with pain, guilt and humiliation perform those bloody rites along with their Hispanic brothers on the Moradas, Jews in general live in a world of “indeterminancy,” which “is not the same as allegorical interpretation, where the hidden meaning is concealed . . . ” (p. 168). A similar story is told by David L. Graizbord about smaller scale activities in the border towns along both sides of the Pyrenees in Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). The conversos discussed by Graizbord seem far less intellectual, self-conscious and successful as entrepreneurs than the families discussed by Révah. We therefore can speculate that this vacillating, insecure and indeterminate way of life represented the basic condition of the Marranos throughout their dispersion.

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denunciations in Rouen, it is more difficult to comprehend why Antonio Enríquez Gómez, after coming out publicly as a Jew and publishing openly Jewish verse, went to live in Seville as a Catholic. Here is where we have to try to reconcile several different possible scenarios, not all consistent with one another. It is possible, for instance, that he really had a change of heart and wished to practice Catholicism again as a more satisfying religion. Or he may have missed the thrill and familiarity of secret Judaism and the threats of the Inquisition. He may also perhaps have wished to enjoy the intellectual excitement and kudos of Spanish civilization rather than the restricted and small circle of Jewish secular and religious authors in France. He and his family knew by experience what happened in Rouen when one New Christian turned on another. Did they think they would be safer in the very midst of Spanish Catholic society? Could the poet have imagined that his writing was powerful and vivid enough in its Christianity to obliterate all traces of his Jewish past? Had he convinced himself and his family, and therefore simply fooled himself and forgotten the harsh realities he lived in? In all of these competing masks reflecting and refracting themselves in the mirror of his experiences, do we search out one man — the real Antonio Enríquez Gómez or two men or more or no one at all, only an amorphous and elusive image?

PENITENCE AND PIETY A “Jew” is an individual (of whatever denomination and religion) who came to the realization that there are no “free lunches,” either down under in planet earth or up there in the world-to-come . . . — José Faur32

Rather than speaking of the Marrano in general and Antonio Enríquez Gómez in particular as a potential Jew, it may be better to think in terms of a confused or fuzzy Jew: confused in the two senses of mixed and blended beliefs and of someone unsure of his intellectual or spiritual commitment; and fuzzy in the mathematical sense of unconventional and unified sets, where the particular individual or family keeps shifting its form and affiliations and thus cannot fit into any predictable existing set or category, this latter sense of fuzziness referring more to the difficulty in finding a place to assign the set than to the inherent insincerity or unstableness of the personalities involved. Révah’s lengthy and detailed analyses of the poems of Antonio Enríquez Gómez demonstrate clearly that the seventeenth-century writer was not confused in his beliefs about Judaism or in his understanding of the historical 32

Faur, Oedipal Paul, IV, p. 54.

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situation in which he lived. The poet could describe the dangers of the malsines and the dangers of the society in which these untrustworthy informants operated. In the long poem dedicated to the memory of the martyr Don Lope de Vera, Antonio Enríquez Gómez empathizes closely with the persecuted Jew and puts an extended apologia of Judaism into his mouth, along with a perspicacious denial of Christian theology. The poet’s familiarity with rabbinic techniques of midrashic exegesis at this stage in his life goes well beyond any casual, superficial knowledge to be found in Catholic propaganda or the subversive pamphlets distributed among Marranos to help them keep the faith.33 Antonio Enríquez Gómez’s enthusiasm for the new messianic fervour sweeping both Christian and Jewish Europe also marks him as a poet of his times, and not a perplexed soul caught between competing ideologies. If he is confused, then it is in a fuzzy way, and he is as confused and mad as the great Baroque heroes Hamlet and Don Quixote.

MAKING HISTORY OUT OF MIDRASH . . . what is not deemed miraculous when it first comes to knowledge? how many things are judged impossible before they actually occur? Indeed, the power and majesty of the nature of the universe at every turn lacks credence if one’s mind embraces parts of it only, and not the whole. — Pliny, Natural History, Book VII34 In the biblical view, however, all of creation was contingent, including all premises. Nothing was necessary . . . Everything could have been otherwise . . . [R]eason . . . became subject to relentless probing in a way that was anathema to the Greeks. — Susan A. Handelman35

In the previous five chapters we have set out some parameters of what midrashing can mean when transferred not just out of the immediate historical period when rabbis were confronting the crisis of the Fall of Jerusalem and the 33

34

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On the distinction between Christian and Jewish understandings and interpretations of textual language, see Susan A Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982) pp. 3–4. For whereas Christian intellectual tradition tends to follow Aristotle in not recognizing “any play within his system . . . Much of Rabbinic thought, in contrast, is oriented around conditional statements, where if becomes the key that opens the discourse to an almost endless play of argument based on all manner of seemingly unrelated conjecture. If, in literary terms, might also be said to correspond to the faculty of the imagination, the what if that opens and creates new and alternative versions of what is . . . ” (p. 14). Pliny, Natural History, trans and ed., H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1947), vol. ii, p. 511. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses, p. 28.

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State institutions of Israel and the Scattering of the Holy People of Israel among the nations. Most radically, however, we have started to suggest that at times the process of such transformations through exegesis was taken into the real world of political events. This makes the question of “historicity” something more than a literary trope or an interpretive strategy. It brings us right into the arena where New Christians, separated from their ancient Jewish identities, communities, and ideals, had to deal with a world — a non-Jewish world, sometimes Muslim, sometimes Christian, and then even, sometimes Protestant and sometimes Catholic — that always treated them as Jewish; and it treated them as Jewish, disregarding any subtle distinctions made between degrees of sincerity in their beliefs, attempts to adhere to the Law under trying circumstances, and performance of cultural acts that they may no longer have been aware of or were actually going out of their way to avoid, deny, or translate into Christian terms. Anita Novinsky36 and Lina Gorenstein37 have shown that in colonial Brazil the history of Marranos is not only different from that of New Christians in Iberia or elsewhere in the world. In fact, they claim that it cannot be only measured in a chronological way, although that is the starting point of their analysis. They divide the development of relations with the hegemonic society that appears in this Portuguese region of the New World according to a scheme that argues for an initial period of Jewish preponderance in the discovery and early settlement of the colony. This happens when the state and the Church, having first seen the distance from Europe and the relative unproductiveness of the economy (especially in comparison to India, where the Portuguese Crown saw its best interests developing) as reasons for conceiving Brazil as a dumping ground for unwanted persons. Hence Portugal allowed and even encouraged migration of conversos across the Atlantic, with the result that a large proportion of the original white population was in fact Sephardi. 36

37

Anita Novinsky, “A Critical Approach to the Historiography about Marranos in the Light of New Documents” in Israel J. Katz and M. Mitchell Serels, eds., Studies on the History of Portuguese Jews from their Expulsion in 1497 through their Dispersion (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press/American Society of Sephardic Studies, 2000) pp. 107–118. Anita Novinsky, “Jewish Roots of Brazil” in J. Elkin and G. Merkx, eds., The Jewish Presence in Latin America (Boston, MA: Allen A. Unimeris, 1987) pp. 33–44. Anita Novinsky, “Consideraciones sobre los criptojudios hispano-portugueses: el caso de Brasil” in Angel Alcalà, ed., Judíos, Sefarditas, Conversos: La expulsion de 1492 y sus consequencias (New York.Madrid: Ambito, 1992) pp. 513–522. Lina Gorenstein, “Realidade cristã e sonhos marranos (Rio de Janeiro, séculos XVII e XVIII)” in Eni de Mesquita Samara, ed., Populaçãos: (Con)vivencia e (in)tolância (São Paulo: Humanitas, 2004) pp. 107–116. Lina Gorenstein, “Brasil marrano: as pesquisas recentes” Apresenta breve relatório das pesquisas sobre Inquisição e cristãos-novos realizadas nos últimos anos. Comunicação apresentada no Seminário Interno do Laboratório de Estudos sobre a Intolerância, 2005. Lina Gorenstein, “La inquisción contra las mujeres (Brasil, siglos XVI–XVIII)” in José Escudero, ed., Intolerância e inquisición (Madrid: Sociedade Estatal de Commoraciones Culturales, 2006) vol. 2, pp. 235–254.

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Then this continuing migration, which eventually saw the majority of former Jews from Iberia settling in the Americas during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Novinsky points out, led to a second period. This next period emerges when two other factors come into play, one being the transference into Brazil from Madeira and São Tomé of the sugar industry, thus giving to Brazil a viable economy it before lacked; and then the brief Dutch rule in the northeastern area (Recife, Pernambuco) which not only brought many practicing Jews into this part of the South America from Amsterdam, Livorno and elsewhere; and demonstrated that there was a potential for economic, social, and intellectual growth not imagined before. What became clear to the government of Portugal, its ecclesiastical officials, and the general Christian population was the importance of asserting the Lusitanian identity of the colony. This occurred at the very same time as an uprising of slaves indicated the need for a more coherent and strong colonial structure. Professional people, commercial families, and others in the colony called for the formation of a new and distinct nationality for Brazil — but one that would also include the New Christian clans that sided with the established society against the Dutch, despite the continued racial and social discrimination and tensions that persisted. In a third period gold began to replace sugar as the most important part of the economy. This shifted the power base from agricultural regions to mining areas of the country, emphasizing two aspects of the national identity that seem at first to be contradictory. On the one hand, the new wealth began to concentrate in the cities and to create a bourgeoisie distinct from the old fidalgo elites, yet still loyal to the crown, to the point where it would even transfer that monarchic power from the metropolis to the New World. On the other hand, the opening up of hinterland towns and culture created conditions in which an educated and wealthy converso class could flourish. Novinsky points out, too, that the paradigm of Marrano culture in Brazil cannot be adequately explained merely in this progressive periodization. Even factoring in the question of gender as Novinsky’s colleague Lina Gorenstein does,38 the general circumstances remain more than a little problematical. The new paradigm has to take into account the geographical divide. New Christians did not all share the same culture or aspirations in the north and south of the country, insofar as the northern region, once the elites of Jewish and Crypto-Jewish society had departed with the Dutch, tended to be mostly poor, uneducated, rural, agricultural labourers. Their cultural memories of Judaism and ability to practice the Law, in no matter how attenuated a form, was 38

Gorenstein, “La inquisción contra las mujeres.” Also see Lina Gorenstein, “A Feminine View on Religious Intolerance: The New Christian Women of Rio de Janeiro and the Inquisition (XVIII Century)” in Hilary Pomeroy, ed., Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference of Judeo-Spanish Studies (7–9 September 2003), Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary, University of London (2006) pp. 15–26.

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compromised by increasing assimilation into the local folk ways of the Sertão. In the south, on the other hand, the majority of individuals and families suspected of Judaizing and hence of maintaining their former Jewish identities, were rich, educated and professional. Their culture was more marked by awareness of high culture, enlightened literature, science, and political ideas. Hence, among these urban elites of the conversos, the culture if not any more distinct in its Jewishness — whether religious or intellectual — tended to be characterized by skepticism, liberalism, and anti-clericalism such was developing at the same time in non-Iberian Europe. But the contrast of an impoverished and attenuated folkloric quasi-Judaism in the rural north and a wealthy, literate and urbane secular culture in the south also does not in itself provide a sufficient understanding of the Brazilian situation. Nevertheless, the history in Brazil of New Christians, Marranos and what Novinsky calls post-Marranos39 did not develop in a cultural vacuum. Events elsewhere in the Lusophonic and Hispanic world empires, as well as shifts in the political and commercial relationships to other European cultures in the New and Old Worlds are also pertinent. This pertinence becomes acute in the network of contacts between different branches of the naçio — the Portuguese-Spanish Nation of Sephardim — since this social and business nation brings together one large extended family, some of whom remain identified as Catholic, others who have returned to or in fact never left Judaism behind, while still others vacillate between these two poles — and occasionally push beyond their categorical limits. Yet as Antonio Vieria, the sympathetic Jesuit — who may himself have been a New Christian — wrote, whatever the individuals and families of New Christians may have wished for themselves and their families, “the Portuguese church did not let them live.”40 This can be taken in at least three ways: • The proposed Law of Extermination of 1683 would, had it been approved, have had ordered the “expulsion of convicted Jews (or their offspring) from the Kingdom of Portugal”41 but it was blocked by the inner council of the Inquisition which needed to continue arresting Judaizers, appropriating their wealth, and maintaining their “core business.” • The very fact that such a draconian law could have been contemplated and the reasons why it was not implemented by the king, Dom Pedro II, is indicative of the virulence of the anti-Semitism endemic in Iberian society at all social levels, a racial hatred that was transported to the New World, though not necessarily to all regions and sectors of the emerging Brazilian civilization. 39

40

41

Novinsky, “A Critical Approach to the Historiography about Marranos in the Light of New Documents.” This is a concept drawn from Edgar Morin, “Preface” to Les Juifs d’Espagne, ed. Liana Levi (Paris, 1992) p. 3. Cited in Novinsky, “A Critical Approach to the Historiography about Marranos in the Light of New Documents.” Novinsky, “Jewish Roots of Brazil.”

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•

Insofar as former Jews of all degrees and tinctures of knowledge and commitment to their ancestral faith chose not to escape from Lusophone lands and culture, even submitting themselves thereby to the jurisdiction of both the Inquisition and the Statutes of purity of blood, it is possible to say that these New Christians absorbed into themselves some of this antiSemitism. So how do people live who are not allowed to live? Anita Novinsky suggests that they were “simultaneously integrated and marginalized”, but this is a mixed metaphor, and it would be better and more accurate — and more interesting — to say that they were (a) integrated and disintegrated and at the same time (b) marginalized and caught in a central place of self-delusion and self-hatred. In spite of three centuries of Christianization and the power that came from wealth, nothing served as a guarantee; in Brazil, New Christians were exposed to the same dangers and humiliations experienced by Jews in other regions. Baptism and assimilation did not free them from harassments that included sentences of life imprisonment, the confiscation of possession, and not infrequently the death penalty.42

Again what is left out of this gloomy picture are the further problems where internalization of the social obloquy and the national exclusion cause a form of madness in the victims, a madness which may manifest in physical illnesses, bizarre behaviours, and strange religious delusions. Some of these delusions are intellectual and may be seen in the proto-Zionist writings of a quasiJewish-judaizante thinker like Damião de Gois43 and some more irrationally and erratically expressed in the bizarre pseudo-kabbalistic witches, wizards and other mystical persons denounced to the Inquisitorial visitors on their infrequent journeys to Brazil.44 To find out, we need to go further into the textures (the textualities) of the problem than organizing the historical data. This has to be done in such a way as to see the development as occurring on more than — although never less than — a list of events. For it was not just that New Christians were forced by circumstances to live “in between” the alternatives that were legally and geographically possible, but they lived (and here the word is Novinsky’s, and though it may be a matter of her non-idiomatic command of English, it is a rich 42 43

44

Novinsky, “Jewish Roots of Brazil.” Anita Novinsky, “Sionismo politico na Renascença portuguesa (Damião de Gois)” originally published in English in Hesed vê-emet: Studies in Honor of Ernest S. Freirichs (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Pres, 1984), trans. By the author. Anita Novinsky, “A sobrevivência dos Judeus na visão de Baruch Spinoza: o exemplo da Paraíba” in Ronaldo Vainfas, Bruno Feitler e Lana Iage, eds., A Inquisição em Xeque (Rio de Janeiro: UERJ, 2006) pp. 151–160. Also see: Norman Simms, “Crypto-Judaism in Brazil: Parts 1 and 2” Journal of Religious History Vol. 31, No. 4, December 2007.

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and provocative word) “disintegrated from the Christian world and disintegrated from the Jewish world.”45 Let us take disintegrated to mean more than “not integrated or assimilated into” and give it a sense of “deconstructed” or rather to avoid the post-modernist implications of such a term “shattered, scattered, and not yet fully re-assembled” — and thus signaling a kabbalistic metaphor guiding this midrashic reading of the situation. This “disintegrated” people also suffer from an ongoing crisis of “integrity,” since, as Marranos, they are never quite sure who or what or why they are. This is similar to the problems that present themselves when we consider the situation in the southwestern United States and the history of the Penitentes. Their history too can be set out according to a chronology of governance of their territory and the establishment or codification of regulations of the Brotherhood. This would take into account the period of initial contacts between the indigenous people and Spanish groups, including initial exploratory expeditions, raids, and informal trading parties; then the more formal entrada led by Juan de Oñate and the setting up of a Franciscan mission to run the territory; this is followed by a period of difficult relations with the local tribes leading up to and following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680; and then a more or less settled period of administration by the colonial viceroyalty in the south until the declaration of Mexican Independence in 1821; again, an unsettled period from that political change in regimes until the Mexican-American War; and then following that the governance of the territories under US administration, the formation of states, and into the modern period. This chronological sequence roughly fits with the three-fold development of the Penitentes as set down by Thomas Steele: a period under Hispanic autonomous rule and relatively irregular regulations of the brotherhoods; a second period of more secret, hostile and organized resistance to Nord Americano Catholic rule; and, after World War II, a period of reconciliation with ecclesiastical officials. Yet merely listing historical periods does not quite explain the diversity of the Penitentes attitudes and practices. A closely related schema, that of, styles of popular image production — of santos, bultos and other sacred art — gives a slightly different perspective, indicating that the members of the brotherhood both respond to and influence the craftsmen who work on their behalf, a dialectic partly related as well to the availability of commerciallyproduced and widely-disseminated icons from Mexican workshops and from the eastern cities of the USA. One can therefore say that traditional Penitente customs of worship and belief developed in reaction to changing attitudes of the Anglo community, the Catholic Church, and the economic status of the Hispanics over the last several hundred years, and that the more the brothers and their supporting communities tolerate their family customs the more the 45

Novinsky, “A Critical Approach to the Historiography about Marranos in the Light of New Documents.” My emphasis added.

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Hermandad seeks to ameliorate the older tensions, deny the acts which raised the greatest hostility, and claim to be — and to always have been — an orthodox and conventional lay Catholic community organization.46 All of this brings us back to the problem of historicity in midrashim as applicable to the inter-relations of Marranos and Penitentes. This historicity, like the “truth value” that confuses “truth”, “value” and “historical facts,” is not directly concerned with archival or archaeological evidence, but rather with a more philosophical, poetic and “legal” sense of the truth as it exists within rabbinic discourses. The history of the two peoples who need to escape, hide, and dissimulate does not actually take place in an actual wilderness — though it occurs in a certain superficial (pshat) sense in the cold, desperate emptiness of the New Lands to the far north of Old Mexico, that mysterious region of underground tunnels and cities, and subversive dreams. But that existential reality that was constructed occurs in what the Sufi mystics call ‘alam al-mithal and the Persians named hurqalya.47 This newly contextualized world, set within the allusive memory of mythical and legendary dreams that form the matrix of sacred books, is the “unseen world,” one that we have already suggested is similar to the encantada of certain Mexican villages. However, it forms more than the opening, that special opening or pshat where, following David Shasha, in the name of Henri Corbin, describes as “the splitting of worlds and the creation of a dialectic spiritual reality,” the site, too, of Jorge Luis Borges’ mystical ficciones, Don Quixote’s Cave of Montesinos, and other sacred deserts: not an empty tract of sand and rock, the passage from the outside in — rather it is the inside of the inside of the space, thus, the shape of the container, as well as the volume and content of what it contains, and thus a locus of testing and recreating the self. As we find in Guillermo Del Toro’s 2006 Spanish-language film “Pan’s Labyrinth”, argues Shasha, these twisted paths, optical illusions, and tromps l’oeil, are the primordial and archetypal mazes “where humanity is tested by a cruel deity, places where the paganism of ancient Greece meets the morality of the Hebrew faith.” To enter such an anamorphotic zone of the mystical is to travel ba’midbar, in to the original source of the word, of language itself. This is Ba’midbar, the Book of Exodus, which narrates the mythical journey from the Land of Idolatry, Slavery and Darkness, Eretz Mitzriam, the serpentine kingdom of Egypt, cutting through the blood red Sea of Reeds, and then to the Mountains of Revelation, Sinai and Horeb, and so continuing to wander for forty years in a labyrinth of 46

47

This narrative of seeming despair returning to new hope is best told in Ruben E. Archuleta, Penitente Renaissance: Manifesting Hope (Pueblo, CO: El Jefe, 2007). Thanks to Ruben Archuleta I am constantly reminded that what is being dealt with in this book are real people, their real beliefs and their real feelings, not abstractions or distant and faded shadows of people who lived hundreds of years ago. David Shasha, “Review Essay: Mystic faith in ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ (Guillermo Del Toro, 2006)” circulated on his private email at [email protected] (5 September 2007).

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testing, endurance and self-re-creation. The normal categories of time, space, identity and reality are — if not suspended altogether — made porous and malleable, and certainly reversible, as in a dream or a myth or a midrash.48 One of the key groups of exegetes dealing with this sense of the midrash as a dynamic historical enterprise is centered on a French internet site called Champ du midrash. The group seems to consist mostly of Christian (or should we say: post-Christian) biblical commentators and art historians, individuals associated with names such as Georges Didi-Huberman, Maurice Mergui and Luc Guegan. The contributors to Champ du midrash in France argue powerfully over dozens of articles and essays that the Scriptures, and above all the Gospels, are not merely midrashic constructions originally composed in Hebrew by writers who know Aramaic, Greek and Latin as well, but that these texts have at most tangential connections to what might be called “real history.”49 They are exegetical exercises, not representations of persons who lived, events that occurred, and often places that can be located on maps and whose ruins can be visited today. Their historicity, their truth value, lies elsewhere in the way in which they create valid arguments concerning traumatic experiences in their own lives and those of their original readers, explanations of difficult and painful new ideas which have come into being in response to catastrophic events, and analyses of other texts whose significance has become highly problematic and contentious because of these changes. These contributors see a special relationship between the New Testament midrashists, the Fathers of the Church, and later Catholic commentators. The group include in their chain of traditional teachings the midrashic processes of such creative activities the work of painters, sculptors and other artists throughout the medieval period and Renaissance. In this way, Champ du midrash is an extremely radical and subversive approach to Christian history and expression. Yet for all that, the contributors tend to stop short of the situation that is at the heart of the Marranos on the Moradas. On the one hand, they limit their discussions of midrash to verbal texts and occasionally pictorial evidence, but 48

49

Handelman makes clear this fundamental distinction that becomes blurred, or seems to be collapsed, when the Marranos perform the same rites of Christian imitatio dei on the moradas: “What the Jews did consider as idol worship . . . was the reification of signs — image making — and this is what the Christians were doing, literalizing Jewish metaphors, taking signs for things, and applying the whole Greek ontology to Scripture and God, thus determining His absolute unity and difference” (The Slayers of Moses, p. 104). Though Daubourg tends to view the Gospels as written completely within a Hebrewspeaking milieu of Jewish messianists, Mergui and the Champ du Midrash group have started to open their field to more influences, recognizing, for example, the extent to which Roman Palestine was part of the Hellenistic world. My own contributions can be seen in Festivals of Blood, Laughter and Justice, in which I begin to break down the generic and cultural barriers between Classical Greek, Roman, Hebrew Biblical and Jewish Rabbinical texts to expose their ritualistic and iconographic similarities. I will develop these ideas a bit further in the rest of this book, but a fuller consideration must await further studies.

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do not discuss at all the dynamics of history, the way in which, as we argue, by midrashing their own experiences, Jews have been able to adjust their imaginations, their institutions, and their understanding of the world to catastrophic events. On the other hand, the Champ du Midrash group do not explore the psychohistorical questions raised by their midrashic exercises; that is, they do not ask what motivates individuals to transform their inner and outer languages, their perceptual and affective “take” on the existential universe, and their ability to maintain the Law under the most trying of circumstances, nor do they ask what the implications of these changes are.

HISTORICITY, HYSTERIA AND HISTRIONICS Perhaps the antagonism between Judaism and Christianity is more historical than doctrinal? — Amos Funkenstein50 Before this period Catholicism was full of cultural variants and the administration of the sacraments was haphazard at best. Orthodox theology was in essence then a sixteenth-century construct that became possible with the use of printed standardized manuals. — Mauricio Rivero51

Many years ago I said that the History of Mentalities was above all the history of unspeakable, unimaginable and inconceivable things, the tensions, in fact, between what could be spoken and what could not, what could be perceived or imagined and what remained as blind spots, blurs and optical illusions (or delusions), and what could be thought about, meditated upon, and rationalized and what lies outside of or beneath consciousness, what has been forgotten in whole or part and what has not yet come into focus in or over the horizon of possibilities.52 Amos Funkenstein claims, in a somewhat similar vein, that “[t]he seeming ‘impossibilities’ of one historical moment became positive 50

51

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Amos Funkenstein, “Jewish History among the Thorns” in Westman and Biale, Thinking Impossibilities, p. 319. Mauricio Rivero, “Mirror Images of Evangelization” Atlantic Millenium Vol. 5 Fall 1997 (Florida International University,. 1997) online at http://www.fiu.edu/~hisgsa/MauricioMirror_Images. Norman Simms, The Humming Tree: History of Mentalities. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992 and My Cow Comes to Haunt Me: European Explorers, Travellers and Novelists Constructing Textual Selves and Imagining the Unthinkable in Lands and Islands beyond the Sea, from Christopher Columbus to Alexander von Humboldt. New York: Pace University Press, 1995.

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resources of conceptual construction and development in another.”53 Though he certainly argues that “a later thought structure transformed a minor possibility into a hegemonic one,” how and why this change happens, and with what implications to the individual, group and national consciousness, is not really addressed. Again, as Carlo Ginzburg points out, “Funkenstein’s idea that historical consciousness mediates between history and memory”54 is wonderfully provocative, but it leaves us still perplexed about the nature of such history — (a) history as the dynamic changes, (b) historiography as the strategies and devices for recording (and hence probably distorting) those changes, (c) histrionics as the performance of events on the stage of world or national or domestic or psychological action or in the court of political, religious and emotional decision-making; and (d) hysterics as the seemingly mad, irrational and wild exhibition of uncontrolled and inarticulate feelings within the individual, the group and the culture. Following in the footsteps of Giambattista Vico, Funkenstein argued that the most vital revolution in the thought of the early Modern Period came with the ability to think outside one’s own mythic (or ideological) paradigms and thus to envision a relativity in the past that opened up a path to reflecting upon one’s own place in the development of rational historical processes.55 What Vico called providence, according to Funkenstein, Came to signify man’s emancipation from nature or even from God, the spontaneity of his social endeavors . . . With the help of this version of [what Hegel categorized as] a List der Vernunft, Vico can reintroduce providence back into history and thus resume, on a richer base, a tradition of Christian philosophy of history . . . seeking to establish the correspondence between the divine plan of salvation and the immanent nature of man.56

But the “cunning of history” does not seem all that cunning,57 that is, not informed by what the Greeks designate as mêtis, a form of ruse, trickery, strategy and oblique thinking that often operates subversively in society and provides an alternative for those out of power to influence the course of events. Where José Faur tends to view, this kind of thinking as primitive, analphabetic and non53

54 55

56 57

Robert S. Westman and David Biale, “Preface” to their edition of Thinking Impossibilities: The Intellectual Legacy of Amos Funkenstein (Toronto, ONT: University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Centuries and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 20080 p. x. Westman and Biale, “Preface” to Thinking Impossibilities, p. xi. Samuel Moyn, “Amos Funkenstein on the Theological Origins of Historicism” in Westman and Biale, Thinking Impossibilities, pp. 143–166. Moyn,“Amos Funkenstein on the Theological Origins of Historicism” p. 150. Detienne, Marcel and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Les ruses de l’intelligence: la métis des Grecs (Paris : Flamarion, 1974) in English as Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991,

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Jewish (or which may be the same thing, kabbalistic), I argue that it stands apart from or beneath rational thought and only appears to be emotional, subjective and erratic. It may, in fact, be that mêtis is very close to what Funkenstein means by “accommodation” and others see as “midrashing”: a way of simulating, dissimulating, disguising and hiding oneself and one’s beliefs — and also a way of fighting back, protecting the self and one’s beliefs, and transforming the conditions in which the struggle is carried on, the performer of midrash thus gaining an epistemological advantage insofar as he or she knows more than the hostile others what is really at stake and how the goal (whatever it may be) can be achieved. With that in mind, we can claim that Maimonides, who understood “accommodation” in the sense of an analogy to God’s control over Scriptures that are constantly needing to express themselves in terms that meet the levels of understanding and frames of reference available to each mentality (or set of mentalities) in each cultural age: “God’s word had to be interpreted not literally but through transposition to the age in which evolution had brought humankind.”58 These transformations in ideology, paradigm shifts, and advances in rational thinking have to underpinned, I am saying, by an engagement with the processes by which the mind is remodeled, and that “mind” is not purely intellectual, not even fully conscious, and not limited to single individuals. The remodeling of the mind to undertake such a radical shift in perceptions begins, we are told by Funkenstein and his students, when Vico takes seriously the myths and rituals of archaic peoples, that is, attempts to read these artifacts as texts of a pre-rational humanity on the way to generating rational institutions and, by so doing, separating themselves from nature — and taking the place of God in the previous paradigms of classical and medieval culture, secularizing those paradigms, and recognizing that the world of human activity is selfcreated. Refining Vico’s nuova scienza, Funkenstein argues that developments within the self-created history now visible as narratives and rituals help us see how we too are able to operate to the limits of our rationality, a rationality that expands each time we remember who and what we are, use that memory to separate our thoughts out from the stories and sacramental actions, and meditate critically on what we do, see, and remember. But such an intellectualization of mental processes can be stuck at difficult points — stumbling blocks, impasses, blind spots — or slide back into regressive dreams and delusions, as in a moral game of Snakes and Ladders if we lose touch with the process itself. Funkenstein was aware of this limitation and hence he came to engage more and more with Maimonides. The Rambam dealt not only with the intellectual problems attendant upon “accommodations” of the Law to changing circumstances. For example, he was concerned with the fact that monotheism could only come into being in a mentality that was filled with and shaped by 58

Moyn, “Amos Funkenstein on the Theological Origins of Historicism” p. 152.

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its own ignorance of anything other than idolatry and polytheism or that Israel was confronted by an almost unprecedented trauma when both the Temple was destroyed and the State dissolved by the Roman conquest. Funkenstein saw that the Rambam was also more profoundly concerned with the reconceptualizing of history itself to take into account such deep and extensive changes to the conceptual and existential world in which Jews had to live.59 Not to see this transformation in the collective mind and in the way in which the documents were inscribed, interpreted, and older texts reinterpreted is one form of madness. It is a mental delusion or delirio that besets the commentators, scholars and ordinary readers in each new age — when the prior conditions of debility, distortion and argumentation have receded into a virtual black hole of forgetting.60 But those original dynamics cannot be dismissed. Even if they seem at present silent, invisible and/or inoperative, this is a shift from active intelligence to passive memory, and then from passivity that deadens metaphors, obscures references, and neutralizes tensions the movement is further into the dark cave of dormant memories. Thus, in the terms we used earlier when setting out the difficulty in addressing the archival documents with their shattered and scattered details, the movement from lists of atomized moments in history wherein the relationship of cause to effect and to new cause provides significance, even without the additional impetus of a Hegelian dialectic (an ideological narrative of thesis, antithesis, synthesis) to creation of contexts which provide meaning by defining the particular data of history with a cultural matrix or code again is insufficient. These two stages of analysis have mythical presumptions that cannot be sustained in the clear light of critical thinking, as Maimonides, Vico and Funkenstein begin to show. For as Maimonides points out, in a passage from the Guide for the Perplexed cited by Funkenstein’s former student Abraham P. Socher, How then is it possible that none of the commandments, prohibitions, and great actions — which are set forth precisely and prescribed for fixed seasons — should be intended for its own sake but for the sake of something else . . . as if this were a ruse invented for our benefit by God . . . ? Hear then the reply . . . the Torah tells a quite similar story: God led them not by the way of the land of the Philistines, 59

60

Abraham P. Socher, “Of Divine Cunning and Prolonged Madness: Amos Funkenstein on Maimonides; Historical Reasoning” in Westman and Biale, Thinking Impossibilities pp. 167–192. It is similar to the delusion described by Daubourg (op. cit.) that besets Christian commentators over two thousand years of thinking that their foundational documents were written in Greek, a so-called but never actually registered koine, rather than Hebrew, and that the allusions and references in the New Testament can be best understood by contextualizing it to Classical Hellenic and Hellenistic literature, philosophy, law, science and politics. The delusion sets in, not when these pagan texts are considered in themselves, but when they totally replace all consideration of Hebrew, Aramaic, biblical and rabbinical sources.

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although it was near . . . But God led the people by way of the wilderness of the Red Sea (Ex. 13: 17–18). Just as God perplexed them in anticipation of what their bodies were naturally incapable of bearing . . . so did he in anticipation of what the soul is naturally incapable of receiving, prescribe the laws . . . so that the first intention should be achieved, namely the apprehension of Him, may He be exalted, and the rejection of idolatry.61

Instead of a Hegellian List der vernunft, Funkenstein, following Maimonides’ ormat ha-shem u-tevunatio, sees in “the cunning of reason” a mêtis that works in and through the limitations of human intelligence, but at the same time as the stuff of this cunning — the words, images and logic, to be sure, but also the shape and size of letters on the page, the numerical equivalence of words, the variations of voicing consonants, the analogies drawn near and far in sacred texts, the puns and other word play in associated languages to Hebrew and Aramaic — remains a matrix of further creative enhancement and expansion, a reservoir of increasing thought and feeling, an ever-widening application of the Law in accommodation to all that human intellect is capable of. In brief, the dormant memory can be awakened by midrash — and more than that, the impasse of an Israel separated from its language, culture, land and customs can be broken through by midrashing. Now let us return yet again to the critique of historians who try to make sense out of the impossible actions and situations into which individuals, families and a whole culture found themselves in when they crossed through the fringes of northern New Spain into the new territories of the Nueva México beyond the horizons of possibility. Here once more we find that ideas stirred up by Funkenstein and his pupil Carlo Ginzburg62 hold us in good stead: “Collective memory,” Funkenstein remarked, is “almost by definition, a ‘monumental’ history in the Nietzschean sense.’ But here a divergence emerged. A vital connection with the past is not synonymous, Funkenstein emphasized, with the “creative freedom” (another Nietzschean echo) “in the use of interpretation of the contents of collective memory.”63

This monumental history is the massive weight of public discourse recorded in documents and kept in archives but also the oppressive weight of oral, nonalphabetic myth. Between them they drive historians crazy, and it is only by the cunning of history, mêtis and midrashing, that sanity and the truth may be found. In the first normative exercise of conventional scholarship, what constitutes a datum or atomic particle can be challenged by substituting the moment of 61

62

63

Guide III:32 cited by Solcher, “Of Divine Cunning and Prolonged Madness” pp. 175–176. Carlo Ginzburg, “History and/or Memory: On the Principle of Accommodation” in Westman and Biale, Thinking Impossibilities, pp. 193–206. Ibid, p. 195.

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particularity by a dynamic process of coming-into-being (and thus includes a going-out-of-being); and in the second, the assembling and recognition of a context begins to crumble when addressed by a question of what determines the selection and how the assemblage is perceived as coherent, consistent and significant. Thus the lists of periods for Brazilian or New Mexican development are each useful heuristic models to begin research, as is pshat in rabbinical exegesis; and association of these specific facts with evaluative themes, such as commercial enterprise, intellectual education, or religious commitment, take us so far and no further, as picking up the hints in rabbinical rezem does in providing a scenario for otherwise unattributed or non-dramatized speeches, meditations and thoughts. In drash, however, the midrashist begins to constitute a different stage and a more dynamic perception of historical persons, places, things, events and ideas. In what seems like adjustment and application of the text or textualized event to its own parameters — taking the place in which it exists as container, content, and regulations of development or change — the midrashist generates a meaning and a purpose adequate to its own constituent elements, including the tensions between atomic parts, the empty spaces between, and the patterns of attraction and repulsion, expressed not as a permanent moment in time (or its reflection or refraction) but as a continuous process. The question of dormant and active memory comes into play because confusing written documents — archival, evidential history — with national memory leads back to idolatry, mythical and poetic apprehension of the world. Proust shows, as he writes to capture memories of times past, that there is a striking distinction between dormant and active memory. In what we recall in practical, everyday feelings, thoughts and actions, the particles of the past are constantly adjusted to new and changing circumstances, recreated when needed for purposes always impinging with unexpected pressures, and experienced as though constant, fixed, and normative. However, in those memories that have been repressed because they are too unpleasant and discomforting to keep in mind or because they seem to have been rendered otiose, trivial and irrelevant, the originary tensions remain locked inside the images, neutralized so long as they remain unexpressed. Though they may be still operative, as both Nietzsche and Freud discovered, in the sense of having shaped the container for later real and artificially-generated memories, which smooth away tensions, resolve painful physical trauma and lingering emotional humiliations, covered over as it were by “screen memories” of more pleasant or at least acceptable artifacts shifted from marginal events in the past, nevertheless so far as rational and conscious thought goes, they have disappeared. When rediscovered, as, for instance, in the famous scene where Proust’s fictional alter ego Marcel sips a tissaine and tastes a madeleine, not only does the repressed archaic memory datum of a long forgotten moment reappear to his consciousness, but that 373

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returning moment rushes into the present with all the powerful baggage of the past, forcing the structures of the present to shake from its certainties and to cause continuing dislocations and reassessments of what is considered to be the natural, normal experience of the present, as well as of the developments which led from the until-this-moment forgotten past to the shock of the revelation and, even further, to the circumstances prior to that archaic memory which, long before Marcel was aware of who and what he was — and his family, neighbours and cultural antecedents — shaped his mind, his soul, his very being.64 Doubtlessly, in regard to our study of Marranos, whether in Brazil or in the southwestern United States of America, access to personal memories of this sort is severely limited. Those men and women who confess now to being the progeny of anousim and attempt to reconstruct an historical past that conforms to what they believe should be their heritage through research into formalized historiography — the scholars they consult, the books they read, the archives they search — do not have the resources to evaluate what more fully and powerfully led to their own breakthrough of recollection (that they are now and so must always have been Jewish in some manner or other), nor to investigate the feelings and perceptions of their recent and more distant relatives who endured the long nightmare of dissimulation and disintegration of their conscious identities and memories, nor to re-create the original traumatic scenarios of forced or voluntary conversion and confrontation with persecuting agents of Church, State and Synagogue. If there is no written documentation to provide the data required and if the physical remains is at best fragmentary, ambiguous and deliberately hidden in the mists of time, then where to find an opening into that dark night of the soul? The answer may lie in the festivals and memorial celebrations of the people who became Penitentes. More than myths, the fiesta de sangre or Festival of Blood is a collective dream, a myth enacted. Like all festivals, it requires crowds, many bodies assembled into a mass, as Canetti argues, and a collective expression of what no individual can remember or desire in the present. The Cave of Plato, but also the mother’s womb, in the place of the darkness, the tenebres, where the light does not penetrate. Iakov Levi reminds us this whole myth is an inter-uterine fantasy: the camera oscura, and then in comes the light through an apertura, where the men are chained by an umbilical cord (Republic VII, 514). Etienne Gilson, a French Catholic philosopher writing as the darkness pressed down on Europe during World War II, remarks in a beautiful poetic passage about how Maimonides imagined the idea of intellectual thought, a passage which sheds great light on the hymns and rituals of the Penitentes: 64

Ginzburg almost comes to see this point but thinks, along with Funkenstein, that “In the case of Proust, individual memory became a sort of secularized religion,” whereas Nietzsche’s “monumental history” was too Christianized (“History and/or Memory” p. 201).

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Maimonides would gladly say, with Henri Poincaré — or rather, he said it before him — that thought is but a flash of light in a long night. He would not admit, however, that is it is this flash alone that matters. No, it is the night that matters, that mysterious night of existence, full of dark potentialities, which surrounds us who see just enough to perceive the night, but not enough to bring light to bear upon it. What the flash rending the night for a moment unveils, the glittering of the stones which our eye perceives, was not created by our reason; it merely perceived them. It is salutary, indeed, for reason to remember the darkness in which it found them.65

Usually history is considered the text of persons and events in the city (the polis) who enjoyed the privileged place of founders and governors. What of those who were hidden behind the masks of the strange plays they perform for others and themselves? Who were these historics or actors with their histrionics masquerading as players on the stage of the world history?

DORMANT MEMORIES AND MIDRASHIM Vico could thus proclaim that Plato and Bacon failed to understand mythology because they imputed too much and the wrong kind of “wisdom” to the ancients. They failed to see that ancient or primitive mythology was not theoretical but practical, historical rather than philosophical, its aim being primarily social, and ultimately political, or “occasional,” to use Vico’s exact term.66

The way to find the dormant memories of the Penitentes, and the even deeper and almost entirely secret and forgotten memories of the Marranos, is, first of all, by working through the text of the history of the Hispanic brotherhoods and New Christian families who settled in the fringes of Spanish-Mexican civilization. In these marginalized areas, liminal zones, and secret caverns of the mind, they created themselves, and passed on these memories as midrashim. And only then, when these adjustments in our own thinking and ways of perceiving the world are done, we may examine the fiesta de sangre which lies at the heart of the Holy Week ceremonies that were performed every year — and in several instances still are, though transformed by contemporary circumstances. The festival has been aptly described by Marta Weigle as a sequence of rites that are “closely supervised expressions of a penitential spirit 65 66

Gilson, “Homage to Maimonides” in Baron, ed., Essays on Maimonides, p. 27. Joseph Mali, “Historical Consciousness Revisited: From Vico’s Mythology to Funkenstein’s Methodology” in Westman and Biale, Thinking Impossibilities, p. 218.

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through self-flagellation, cross bearing, and other forms of mortification,”67 constituted by a gathering of people in particular places, these places consisting of the morada, the route to Calvario, and the actual and mythical countryside through which the procession passes. It also consists of the alabados (hymns of praise) sung, the prayers intoned, the atmosphere created, and the art works seen, recalled, and re-enacted in the actions of the disciplinas. Throughout the recorded history of the region, officials have reported on the activities of this brotherhood, sometimes in a decidedly negative and sometimes in a more positive way, but always in terms of the literate historical discourse that is separate from the dynamic rites and the living participants themselves. At best, we might say, a Romantic and primitivist mentality accords to the Penitentes a place in that history which is ancillary to the real (that is, modern, secular, Anglo) conditions of the world. Thus Richard B. Stark reports on what E. Boyd, one-time curator of the Spanish Department of the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, had to say on this matter: From the Spanish Catholic ancestry of these settlers came their passionate identification with the physical suffering of Christ, which led them not only to meditate on those sufferings but to reenact them, enduring physical pain even as their Lord did. When the Penitente sings of the azotes (lashes) that Christ suffered, he sings with profound understanding.68

This seems like an unexceptional statement of the obvious, and is indeed in some variation repeated by all serious students of the region and its culture. Here there is a pshat, a received opinion that interprets the songs and feelings of the Penitentes from the outside based on an assumption — a superstitio in the sense of a rhetorical claim to know what someone else in another time and place and other mental conditions feels and thinks. The publicity notice for Stark’s collection puts the matter even more bluntly: “The dark dirges and morbid religious hymns of the alabados were used for death rituals such as wakes, funeral processions, 67

68

Cited by Richard B. Stark in “Dark and Light in Spanish New Mexico”, pp. 1–23; the record notes to New World Records 80292 available online at http://www.newworldrecords.org/ linernotes/80292 (Seen 29/08/08). Of this record collection and its introductory notes, the publisher claims: “Dark and Light in Spanish New Mexico is a wonderful example of salvage anthropology, preserving as it does the unique musical expression of a bygone tradition. At one time, roughly between 1600 and 1850, alabados (Spanish Catholic hymns) and bailes (social dances) thrived, the one as spiritual expression of the moradas (local chapters of the Penitente brotherhood) and the other as social dance music. Today, these art forms are mere spirits in the Hispanic villages of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. The dark dirges and morbid religious hymns of the alabados were used for death rituals such as wakes, funeral processions, and burials. The bailes, on the other hand, were performed by guitarists and violinists at birthday parties, weddings, and other high-spirited occasions where dancing was not only permissible, but essential.” See http://www.newworldrecords.org/about-us.shtml. “Cited by Stark, “Dark and Light,”p. 2.

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and burials.”69 The sorrows, pains and meaning of the ritual is ascribed to a representative or mimetic purpose: the participant imitates Christ, feels through his own pains what Jesus did in His Passion, and consequently the performer expresses in his alabado “profound understanding,” some form of intellectual comprehension. However, from our further investigations into the actualities of the historical moment in which the ritual came into being in New Mexico, specific conditions that were not the same as created or perpetuated analogous customs in sixteenth-century New Spain, Reformation Iberia or medieval Europe, we would suggest that the penitent brother in the ritual was enacting a more complex mythic or poetic or psychological role: he was concerned, to be sure, with his own and his community’s sense of sinfulness, alienation from the Eucharistic grace of the Church, fears and anxieties in a strange and hostile environment, and other and more powerful emotions stemming from memories too deeply buried to be recognized. Nevertheless, Stark recognizes that “When the Penitente sings of the amarga soledad (bitter loneliness) of the Virgin at the foot of the Cross, he is also singing of his own loneliness.”70 Stark further alludes obliquely to these occluded motives when he says, constructing his comment in an incomplete passive voice: There is speculation that the New Mexican alabados may be related to music of the Spanish Jews, or Sephardim; that they may be like the thirteenth-century Italian laudi spirituali (spiritual songs of praise inspired by the lauds of St. Francis of Assisi) sung during processionals by penitents who lashed their bodies to rid their souls of sin; and so on. But no one at this time knows for certain the origin of the alabados of New Mexico.71

Let us look at these three speculations he offers: 1.

2.

69

70 71

First, in suggesting there may be a Sephardic background or context or origin for the hymns — all of which may be subsumed in the rather vague “may be related to” — he stops short of the designation which could be the only way possible for Jewish music to have reached New Mexico. The Sephardim would have to be New Christians and their songs, both the music and the lyrics, would necessarily be transmitted by people whose consciousness was shaped by their fears, their careful need to hide their past identities, and their concerns for the present in which they are trying to make sense of the disintegrated life they find themselves involved with. Second, he refers to Franciscan praise songs and their setting within twelfth or thirteenth-century Italian penitential processions, but in so doing he elides Album Cover, Dark and Light in Spanish New Mexico (New York, NY: New World Records, 2005–2008) Cat. No. 90292. Stark, “Dark and Light,” p. 2. Ibid, p. 3.

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3.

the relationship between the specific music of this European tradition, which has a certain connection to the friars who accompanied Don Juan Oñate in the 1590s but, as we have already seen, cannot have more than a tangential or oblique connection to the Penitentes themselves, and the context of those two moments of Franciscan piety he alludes to: (a) Francis of Assisi’s own lauds, which may be associated with Sufi mysticism in general, and with Hebrew songs by composers such as Ibn Gabirol in particular72 whose pious poems became known even among Christians such as St Francis; and (b) the imitations of those praises a century later in a Franciscan movement divided in its allegiance to the formative memory of its founder. After muddying the waters even further by a vacuous addition of “and so on”, Stark disavows, at least for the present, that anyone knows for sure what the “origin” of these alabados could be, thereby exposing his own commitment to the historiography which provides the substance of his own scholarship. In other words, he overlooks the simple fact that the alabados originate among the Penitentes; that while there may be — and probably were — analogous songs, melodies and words, elsewhere, it is only among these particular Hispanic people in New Mexico that the genre arises.

A little later, discussing the use of the pito or flute during the ceremonies, Stark cites musicologist William R. Fisher who in 1952 described the very individual manner in which the instrument is played, and concludes that “The Pito melodies are undoubtedly of local origin,” though each melody may be related to an older “Psalm tone.”73 What we note in this really quite rich commentary on the alabados that Stark provides for the recording of the songs is that the generalizations he makes force the specific details he cites into a discursive argument that wants there to be a single grand narrative for the Penitentes, as there is for New Mexico, and that it is a European, or perhaps better, a Spanish history, into which the Penitentes fit as a minor variation. The problem, however, is not with any postmodernist distrusting of such grand narratives, but with the fact that Stark is trying to narrate the wrong one, one that excludes the New Christians, not just here in New Mexico but in all of Hispanic America, and even in Iberia. Thus in his notes to Track 4 on the recording, the alabado called “Dividio el Corazio” performed by Ricardo Archuleta and Luis Montoya as vocalists and Vicente Padailla as pitero, he explains: 72

Peter Cole, “Introduction” to his translated Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) online at http://press.princeton.edu/

titles/6933 (seen 7/09/2008). “The vocabulary of Jewish poesis, or making, goes back to a crisis of refuge and interior design. It has always been cultic, just as its ethos has most often been abstract, at a certain remove from the figure.” 73

Stark, “Dark and Light,” p. 5.

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An afilador [an itinerant knife grinder] who often came through the narrow streets of the old Jewish-quarter in Seville played a melodic formula [on his panpipe] that even sounded like this alabado, with a constant reiteration of do re mi up and down and then an ascent of five notes, la ti do re mi. A musicologist in Seville agreed that this alabado was like the music of the neighborhood afilador and said that it was vaguely familiar to him, like something out of his childhood in Galicia. (The Galician town of Orense was formerly the only place were pipes of this kind were made.)74

Here again we find several intriguing, mystifying and troubling statements all rolled up into one, including the parenthetical sentence at the end. 1.

2.

It looks at first like the association is made between the melody of this alabado and the traditional music heard in the old Jewish-quarter in Seville, with the implication that there is something Jewish about the tune. But since the Jews were expelled from most parts of what is now Spain in 1492, the only memories that remain have to come through oblique and distorted means, at the most extreme through some Crypto-Jewish connection by knife-grinders who continue to call attention to themselves with these very old melodies; more likely, the knife-sharpener’s tune belongs to a nonJewish tradition altogether. Yet is the suggestion of a Sephardic association so far-fetched? What is usually remarked about the Spanish-speaking Jews of the Levant and the Balkans is their preservation of both speech and songs long since lost in the metropolis of Castile and other parts of Spain where they came from. Still, then, if there is a connection between these two musical pieces, that does not mean that the tune was originally Jewish, only that Sephardic tradition held on to it longer than anyone else, except the afilados of Orense. Yet, looked at closely, Stark’s evidence comes from an unnamed musicologist in Seville, who is not even a native of the city but was born in Galicia. This authority gives his opinion in a most subjective and unscientific manner: there is a “vague familiarity” about the alabado the American scholar plays for him. What the musicologist actually says, according to Stark, is that Orense is the only place where such pitos were made; he doesn’t suggest that the melody originated in that town or is only known among knife-grinders. Yet Galicia was more tolerant and supportive of Jews than Castile and many other parts of Spain, and Jews, though not known as knife-sharpeners, were often entertainers, musicians, and composers. So we are left with a possibility of something interesting — and not much more.

In another note to an alabado, Stark again writes of the reactions of a metropolitan Spanish authority who reacts to the hearing of one of these Southwestern United States Penitente songs. The hymn in question is on Track 6 of Dark and 74

Stark, “Dark and Light,”p. 9.

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Light in Spanish New Mexico, “Buenos Dias, Paloma Blanca” (Greetings, O White Dove) sung by Ricardo Archuleta: When an official at the Instituto e Cultura Hispanica in Madrid heard this alabado, he immediately identified the melody as like some of the coplas Sefardies, songs of the Spanish Jews, and suggested looking at a collection in the institute’s library. This collection, dating from 1932, was indeed of Sephardic songs, but arranged for piano and voice in nineteenth-century art-song style by the musician who collected them in Rhodes and Turkey. Without hearing field recordings or seeing notations before the arrangements were made, one was helpless to know if there was any possible connection between them and the alabados of New Mexico. Arcadio Larrea, who dated this alabado from the eighteenth century, thought that one of the New Mexican alabados he knew resembled any [sic] Sephardic music he had encountered in his research.75

The passage is once more as provocative as it is disappointing, An historical connection is suggested and then quickly withdrawn: the alabdao seems to be recognized to be something like a Sephardic song but then the archival collection, when checked, only has a score that has been so interfered with by the anonymous nineteenth-century collector that there is no way to check out the possibility of a meaningful relationship. Or so we are led to believe, because Stark takes us from an unnamed official,” whose “immediate” recognition turns out to be fanciful and vague, on to another expert whose ability to give a precise date appears to be only that of a librarian or archivist and not that of an experienced ethnomusicologist or sensitive musician. Why the hesitations and circumlocutions? Why the failure to connect? If Stark had really wanted to know more he would have visited any number of performing musicians who specialize in Sephardic songs, he would have interviewed ethnomusicologists who have worked with Sephardic institutions in Europe, America and Israel, and perhaps would have listened to dozens of readily available recordings of traditional romanceros, coplas and other music of the Sephardic Diaspora. In brief, here is another opportunity missed by scholars and artists to examine the Penitentes in a serious way. That kind of misconceived scholarship offers us little more than what any local amateur historians do, even though we must be thankful for recordings such as Dark and Light. In regard to the themes of light and darkness in relation to Sephardic concepts of the Law, one should read David Ramirez’s essay El Macabeo, particularly the section “La lumbre Macabea: Light and Law in Hebrew Discourse,” in which the author examines Miguel de Silveira’s 1638 poem.76 Silveira (ca. 1580–1638), who was one Cervantes’ closest friends, “summarized the entire Zionist enterprise of the Maccabees on one 75 76

Stark, Dark and Light, pp. 12–13. David Ramirez, El Macabeo (privately distributed 12/22/03).

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imposing axis of the Law (the Torah).” Though it may be questionable whether “Zionist” is an apt word for a mid-seventeenth-century enterprise such as this Baroque poet’s epic in twenty volumes and whether it is justifiable to transfer the concept of a Maccabean revolt to the resistance of the Marranos to total assimilation into Catholicism, Ramirez does open up new and interesting ideas in his examination of the imagery of light and darkness in El Macabeo.77 Light is conceived as “rayos de su vista penetrante” (rays of His penetrating sight) while the word breaks into “tinieblas . . . del abismo” (an abyss of darkness). Under foreign rule of the Seleucid Greeks, the Jerusalem Temple is “traslado en mentido simulacro” (transferred into a false scheme, that is, a false semblance or simulacrum of itself). But the Maccabees rescue the Children of Israel, purify the Temple, and “abrió las Fuentes de su eternal lumber” (open the Fountains of His eternal light), thus “anima la terrestre pesadumbre” (animate the grief-stricken and saddened earth). The magnificent metaphysical conceit reminds one of the poetry of contemporary English poets Donne, Herbert and Crashaw. That similar themes, though couched both in a Christian mode and in a Franciscan discourse approaching the low style or sermo humilis, appear in Penitente hymns should not be surprising. In their alabados, the brothers feel free to express their longings for divine light and transportation, through their shared sufferings with “father” Jesus, into a higher experience. This pious hope, however much it may share with New Christian longings for redemption and return to their ancestral identities, cannot merely be attached to ad hoc customs and objects that bear a fleeting resemblance to Jewish traditions, particularly when these traditions are already late calques of Ashkenazi experience brought into the American southwest only in the second part of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, such calques do signal a cultural search for publically available markers of Judaism, even if they are outside of most Sephardic memories. One of Hispanic locals in the region, Abe Pena, for several years wrote a weekly column of his recollections and conversations with people he knew in the Cibola County Beacon, and could therefore say in one of his “From the Past” reports: If possible a Franciscan priest made it to San Mateo from Grants to pray the funeral mass in church and Los Hermanos Penitentes prayed a rosary at the velario,78 if the deceased was a Penitente . . . In the neighboring village of San Rafael, Don Procopio Boca was buried in 1968, according to his son Ismel, “in front of La Morada without a coffin. A hole was dug at the head of the grave, where his head rested, and with a blanket over his body was buried in the Penitente tradition . . . ” 77

78

In the translations that follow I have taken the liberty of making more idiomatic and poetic the language used by Ramirez. A house of grieving or mourning.

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. . . In San Mateo, some of the old timers used to talk of the burial in 1889 of El Coronel Manuel Chaves without a coffin, “in the old Spanish tradition.”79

This two-part statement is also provocative and incomplete, leaving us with possibilities but no clear evidence to go further, that is, to do more than those scholars who still deal in random details and fragmented memories that we discussed earlier in this book. With Abe Pena we have at least have something close to “first hand” data, twice over in this instance. What intrigues me here, in our search for dormant memories that we can explore midrashically, is not the possibility that burial without a coffin is a remnant of Jewishness preserved by the Penitentes, but rather: (1) the confirmation that the Penitentes stepped in when the Franciscan priest failed to preside at the funeral of a brother, thus bolstering the case for the more than supplemental role they still play in local worship; (2) the positioning of the body in burial supplements the absence of a coffin, but also perhaps more significantly the fact that this was not something done at every burial or for every Penitente, suggesting obliquely that some brothers followed a minority tradition still honoured by all, whether or not its historical origins were recognized; and (3) the phrase “in the old Spanish tradition” echoes “in the Penitente tradition” suggests that not only Spanish/ Penitente has a special significance, but also that if we substituted “Sephardic” for “old Spanish,” we might see an awareness in the local community that some of their brothers have a New Christian (Jewish converso) heritage. However, these speculations are probably idle. The richness of the traditions and the “thickness” of the textures in which historical truth is hidden require very different means of approach. For one, Stark’s separation of the musical heritage of the southwest region in the last several centuries into “light and dark,” profane and sacred songs, with hymns and similar liturgical lyrics and melodies on the one side and secular and popular tunes on the other imposes modern categories on the body of material. Silvia Hamui Sutton argues convincingly that in the culture of Crypto-Judaism and Marranism in Mexican territories “the prevailing social dynamic was one of fear and distrust.”80 Consequently, she observes, “[t]his caused exchanged mechanisms used among those that kept the faith,” by which she means that “the codes emerged as a cohesion and understanding resource” created “an artificial set of transformation rules inserted in a context common to issuer and receptor to produce their own derivative messages.” This code consists of nicknames for friends and enemies, neologisms and bizarre names for practices such as confession, lying and 79

80

Abe Pena, “Don Eduardo — El Carpintario” From the Past, Cibola Couinty Beacon http:// www.cibolabeacon. com/features/ — (Seen 9/12/2006). Silvia Hamui Sutton, “Some Communication Codes between Crypto-Jews in the Secret Prisons of the Inquisition in New Spain” Halapid 15:1 (Winter 2008) 4.

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hiding one’s family connections, and substitute actions and objects which seem harmless to the outsider but insulting to and mocking of the hated culture the initiates wish to comment upon safely. Sutton explains that “The purpose of this practice was to cover up compromising activities and refract the signs alluding to them directly.” Though she focuses in her essay on the strategies used in the inquisitorial jails in Mexico after 1642, her remarks hold true for the previous period and for circumstances in the fringe areas of New Spain as well. In particular, returning us to the subject at hand, she says, “there were judaizer prisoners that communicated by singing”, and she cites the minutes of the Holy Office of a family by the name of Vaez, where Gonzalo, his sister Leonor and his mother Ana sang couplets to one another, these performances having been observed by a spy hidden behind the wall of their cells: And a woman’s voice was heard saying many endearments to the forementioned Gonzalo Vaez in a strong voice: “Be calm and speak for I am your sister and your mother, and I am very sad, disconsolate as I had not spoken to you before.” And the aforementioned Gonzalo responded by singing: “Rejoice, so I too can hear you, but do not talk to me; what does it matter; and I will tell you in song whatever you ask me.”81

The question arises here as to whether these are spontaneous lyrics created for the occasion or whether they are words to a traditional romancero, a medieval Spanish love song now adapted to the new situation. If the words are extempore between the brother, sister and mother, then we may wonder why they adopt the roles of courtly lovers conducting a secret erotic affair; if, however, the lyrics are already in existence but changed in small ways, then we can better understand why the performers feel safer in their expressions of solidarity and mutual love in that they assume that any listeners — and they would have no doubt that informants had been placed within hearing distance precisely to gather evidence the inquisitors could use against them — would recognize the formulas of the romancero, if not the specific song, and not be aware of the specific messages being conveyed. This kind of transformation of a text’s original secular, erotic and courtly tonalities and frames of reference to the encoded religious, spiritual and domestic expression can be categorized as contrafaction. Judith R. Cohen, one of the best-known performers and scholars of Sephardic song, has pointed out that there is more than one kind of music included under this rubric, not just depending on whether you include within the term Sephardic any and all Jews who are non-Sephardic (such as Levantine, Arabic and Greek) or include various languages, dialects and cultural traditions from the lands of the Diaspora or restrict the definition to music in Ladino or 81

Sutton, “Some Communication Codes” 4.

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Judeo-Español and Iberian traditions, both Spanish and Portuguese (or more restricted designations such as Castilian, Leonese, Navarese, etc.).82 Recent scholarship on the songs sung by the Carvajal family in the Inquisition’s dungeons in Mexico City indicate that they are closely related to many of the compositions still performed by Sephardim in the Mediterranean Diaspora. This would confirm Sutton’s view that popular music was taken over by judaizantes and used within their larger codes of communication between themselves, both satirizing the forces arrayed against them outside and inside the confines of their incarceration, and, not least, as ways of formulating into fairly coherent statements their previously inchoate, incomplete and confused beliefs as Jews. Such modern investigation into explicitly religious music, however, does not easily carry over to discussion of the songs sung by the Penitentes on the moradas throughout the year or in their more private Holy Week celebrations, This is because, whatever the origins of such melody, lyrics, or generic tonalities, the Crypto-Jews who were forced to become as articulate as possible about their own Jewishness when faced by the inevitability of martyrdom in the secret prisons of the Holy Office, finally put aside all pretence once they realized what they were up against and where their real aspirations lay, making of their songs — what they usually could not (or would not) do otherwise in public confessions of faith or in written testaments to their children and grandchildren. Only a rare individual like Luis de Carvajal el Mozo in the mid-1590s, approximately the same time as Don Juan Oñate’s entrada into New Galicia and thus the foundational period of the Penitentes, could fascinate the Holy Office sufficiently to allow him to keep extensive records of his journey of discovery into the meaning of the Judaism he began to understand more fully as a prisoner with little or no hope of release from the charges against him. Yet his sister Leonor’s singing also is striking by the large repertoire of texts she knew.83 Adapting well-known popular songs and traditional melodies of their childhood was more usually the vehicle for the secret Jews’ religious credo, allowing that word to take on a more emotional signification than normally given and echoing the sense attached to it in ecclesiastical contexts. Since the Marranos in the brotherhood of the Penitentes were not seeking to speak out in front of or against their Hispanic fellows and generally may 82 83

Judith R. Cohen, “Sephardic Song” Midstream (1 July 2001) A key authority in this regard is Michelle M. Hamilton, “La poesía de Leonor de Carvajal y la tradición de los criptojudíos en Nueva España.” Sefarad 60:1 (2000), 75–93. See also her Wine, Women and Song: Hebrew and Arabic Literature in Medieval Iberia, co-edited with David Wacks and Sarah Portnoy (Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2004). In addition Arthur Beneveniste, with assistance of Dolores J. Sloan, “The Poetry of Leonor de Carvajal and the Crypto-Jewish Tradition in New Spain” Halapid online at http:// www.cryptojews.com/leonor_de_carvajal (Seen 1 July 2008).

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not have been aware of any specific differences in what they believed about the rituals they performed, it is not likely that the alabados contain within their conscious lyrics any subversive elements, that is, words or images that are meant to mock the Christian faith or the penitential exercises the songs accompany. That does not mean, however, that there was not a secret or dormant memory of counter-feelings and thoughts in the hymns. Nor does it mean that the Marranos had no other occasions in which to express their discomfort, if not disbelief, in the foundations of the community that they sought to bond with and find meaning in. Though it is important when considering the place of alabados and other music associated with the Penitentes to deal with the melodic line and its sources in earlier Spanish or Jewish traditions and with the lyrics and their meanings and history in Catholic and Hebrew iconography, we cannot over look other perhaps more fundamental aspects: (1) Music is patterned sound and silence and thus highly emotional, connected to somatic rhythms, such as heart rate and less regular pulsations of hormonal release and relaxation; these rhythms interact with the cognitive and affective functions of the mind as mind is constituted throughout the persons involved, individuals and groups, to be sure, but also, in many cultures, dead ancestors, distant relatives, and significant but absent contemporaries, as well as various kinds of sacred beings, evil, good and neutral. (2) The musical performance is a social event involving groups of people and specialized organization of time, place, and action; the music or song may either be the occasion around which the festival is organized or which gives it boundaries of time, space and symbolic relevance, or it may be experienced as a constituent part representing an awareness of self that is distinct from normal, profane consciousness or group solidarity, redefining or reconstructing the ego-identity in terms of non-human, immortal, ahistorical or pre-cultural. (3) the function of the melody and words fit within larger contexts of worship, public and private, and worship itself fits within other patterns of “play” that give meaning to a culture and a civilization. These words and musical motifs may be felt to come to the performers from above, outside or inside their normal relationships or to be constituted by their assembling in association with usually invisible, silent and ineffable “others” who then replace, displace, or juxtapose themselves to the original participants in the ritual play. This understanding of the place of music, poetry and art leads us towards our final assessment of the Marranos on the Moradas as a ritualized form of selfmidrashing. Thus we need to set out the worlds of a contemporary student of 385

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this process, Stéphane Zagdanski, by which a rabbinic trope is transformed into a Christian and later a secular modality of historical expression: Je nomme cette étrange modalité de l’impureté [de Dieu] la texturalité. La pensée est venue à tournoyer au cœur de textes grandioses, ceux de la Cabale, du Midrach et, bien entendu, du fabuleux Talmud. Car les Rabbis ont vécu le Texte comme un texture et la lecture comme de la couture, un travail pulsatile de découpures et de sutures, n’ayant cessé de relier les fibres du Livre (lettres, mots, versets, expressions, opinions, erreurs, répétitions, interpolations, commentaires, interprétations de commentaires, traditions et hérésies diverses) entre elle et a leur ailleurs, à l’invention intérieure de leur transmission. Ils ne laissèrent pas de tailler, de taillader, de découper à vif ce sublime matériau passé de génération en génération, ourdissant leur incomparable chef-d’œuvre de ferveur pensée comme d’autres, à la même époque, burinaient leurs premières cathédraux.84 I name this strange modality of [God’s] impurity texturality. This way of thinking turns on the fulcrum of the great texts, such as Kabbalah, Midrash, and, naturally, the fantastic Talmud. For the rabbis experienced the Text as a texture and they read it as cloth-cutting, a work pulsating with cuts and sutures, never ceasing to weave the fibers of the Book (letters, words, verses, expressions, opinions, errors, repetitions, interpolations, commentaries, interpretation of commentaries, traditions and diverse heresies) between it and their others, for the interior invention of their transmission. They never stopped measuring, tailoring, cutting to the quick the sublime material passed on from generation to generation, expanding their incomparable masterpiece with a mental fervor as others in the same epoch built their first cathedrals.

84

Stephane Zagdanski, “Prologue de L’Impureté de Dieu” Premier Colloque International d’Etudes Midrashiques (CIEM 2005) pp. 5–6.

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I don’t know how many times I have been told that the Penitentes are cults, they are devil worshipers, and they sacrifice virgins. — Ruben E. Archuleta1 The ruins of a Penitente chapel stand on the northern edge of the Canadian river canyon, some 40 miles east of Wagon Mound, New Mexico. It has been reported that shadows have been seen darting across trees and rocks. Unnerving feelings can be easily sensed that seem to emanate2 from the area near the old chapel and sometimes disembodied voices are heard. No one has ever been out there at night. — Cody Polston3 Then she fashioned out of empty vapour an effigy in the form of Aeneas, a weird sight, a shade without strength or substance, armed with Trojan weapons. She copied his shield and the crest on his godlike head and gave the phantom power to speak its empty words. Sound without thought she gave it, and moulded its strides as it moved. It was like the flitting shapes which men say are the ghosts of the dead, or like the dreams which delude our sleeping senses. There in high glee in front of the first line of warriors pranced this apparition and goaded Turnus by brandishing weapons and shouting challenges. — Virgil, Aeneid, X. 636ff.4

1 2 3

4

Ruben E. Archuleta, Personal correspondence, 7 May 2008. The original document says “emulate.” Cody Polston, “Investigation Report: Los Hermanos Penitentes” Southwest Ghost Hunter’s Association (18 November 2001) online at http://www.sgha.net/penitente. The personnel listed as participating in this investigation are Cody Polston, Bob and Dana Carter and Jessica Irwin. David West, trans. Virgil, The Aeneid, rev ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1990, 1991) p. 229.

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Sometimes people object to the direction of my argument as outlined in this book or in talks that I give at learned conferences. They point out that there are many books which take the position that all that can be said about the Penitentes is what can be confirmed in written documents, and that searching the archives is at best a frustrating affair because so much evidence has been lost or perhaps never existed. Just sticking to this formal protocol of crediting with proper validity letters, newspapers, printed and manuscript books, and various pamphlets printed in the midst of quite heated debates and controversies, the picture that emerges is at best fragmentary and unclear. The Penitentes as such — putting aside in this argument the other names such small, isolated and relatively inchoate sodalities or cofradias may have had prior to the nineteenth century — have a relatively brief history, at most emerging from the mists of time at the end of the eighteenth century and taking definable shape in years around the declaration of Mexican Independence. Nevertheless, even then, as the region of what is now the southwestern USA became more isolated than ever from the centres of civil and ecclesiastical control, the picture is still pockmarked by dark spots and covered over by dubious propaganda. The scholars admit their ignorance as much over and over again, to the point where we have to ask this question: if there are so many gaps and lapses in the evidence, on what basis are the generalizations, tentative as they formally be called, made? Therefore what is evidence? And once we clarify that point — showing that Latin evidentia translates Greek enargeia in the sense of “vividness” — then we can ask the next question: if the assumptions upon which these tentative conclusions reached by normative scholarship are themselves put aside as inadequate or even irrelevant, then what happens when we put in their place other kinds of assumptions which seem just as valid and vivid — and tentative, too, of course? 389

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When I speak of the Penitentes, however, I am talking about something that is not quite exactly the current hermandades which developed after the Franciscans withdrew from the region, and the other changes at Independence for Mexico, absorption into the USA, and Bishop Lamy’s attempts to regularize and bring the region’s Catholicism into line with the standards current in France and the eastern United States and later local episcopal regulations, including the influence of Italian Jesuits. Throughout these written documents there is a condescension towards the local people and their religious history, a hostility towards the kind of Catholicism they persisted in long after it became unfashionable and considered dangerous to the Vatican and its overseas officials. Racial prejudice, national bigotry, and theological exclusivism all shape the attitudes expressed by the men sent, first, to take over the governance and instruction of the region’s Catholics and, then, to counteract the encroachments and challenges of the various Protestant missionaries. The Protestant churches themselves engaged in highly loaded and vitriolic propaganda wars, as much to discredit their Catholic clerical rivals in the field as to woo the lay Hispanics and Penitentes into their fold. Territory and later state officials, newspaper editors, and other Anglo spokesmen found that the prestige of their newly-founded towns and commercial enterprises often was vulnerable to the reputation garnered by morbid curiosity in regard to the Penitentes, and hence sought to allay suspicions among potential settlers and investors in the region by one or more of the following tactics: (a) to trivialize the extent and influence of the Penitentes as representative of Hispanic religiosity and its impact on the local inhabitants as farm workers, urban labour, and future consumers; (b) to idealize the exotic aspects of disciplinary rituals, making them quaint but ultimately harmless left-overs of a bygone day, like the costumes and dances of the Indian tribes in the surrounding villages; and thus (c) to advertise these colourful customs as tourist attractions. The names and structures change, as do the rationalizations for what happens in Penitente ceremonies and rituals, but what just about every serious scholar comes up with is a twin problem: (a) how explain the communalcharitable confraternity with its defining ritual acts in extra-liturgical discipline, and (b) how align that to the constant rubbing against the grain of ecclesiastical authorities, whether friars, priests, or Inquisition. The focus here cannot be archival, as though the phenomena we are trying to understand are first and always historical, and therefore the evidence required for discussion will be objective documents, archaeological monuments, and personal (oral) testimonies. There is a different view of history. As we have already hinted in our discussions of midrash, there is a kind of evidence which is rhetorical, that is, which belongs to a process of interpretation of processes in the textuality (or even texturality) of the mind, of the collective consciousness, of the dormant 390

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memories expressed, as in dreams, through all the condensations, displacements, replacements and so forth that Freud discovered to be the essence of dreamwork. Therefore, we have tried to argue, perhaps simultaneously rather than sequentially, that there is an explicit history to be explicated and a latent textuality to be midrashed. I think the assumptions that such historians work on have to be modified: (i) the earliest settlers were not just like all others from old Mexico, in that there is a peculiar mix of people, from Oñate and Carvajal onwards, that is, people who chose precisely to be out of the range of authority, regular worship, even as it was changing to meet political and theological development. The historical evidence is probative. An extraordinary number of the first settlers who trekked north from Mexico City or Vera Cruz were New Christians whose bona fides were not questioned as the leaders of these expeditions received special passes to allow the individuals and families to travel into New Spain without proof of limpieza de sangre. Many others went on unofficial entradas, sneaked away from the camps of the organized ventures, deserters, or were there in the background as servants, runaway slaves, criminals seeking refuge, and persons of dubious identity. There were thus not so much random men and women of dubious background to draw the suspicion of the inquisitors but whole clusters of people of known New Christian provenance. (ii) This means the kind of geographical and historical specifics that Stanley Hordes shows, though perhaps he and Abraham D. Lavender go overboard a bit with their DNA tests,5 yet throughout the northern regions of Nueva España there does seem to be ever-present suspicion of the so-called Portuguese connection, that is, Nuevos Cristianos from Portugal who either travelled first to Castile or went directly to territories under Spanish dominion in the New World and were held to be by definition Judaizantes, conversos with a propensity to Jewish beliefs and customs and tainted by impurity of blood, la mancha. In the comments made to Gloria Goldman and in published testimonials by current Hispanics claiming to be of Sephardic heritage, there is a refrain of characteristic qualities: a supposed Portuguese background, a family memory of persecutions by the Holy Office, a special sanctity attached to keeping traditional identities secret, and a sense of anti-clericalism that touches more or less deeply into the 5

See for instance Abraham D. Lavender’s review of Stanley M. Hordes, To the Ends of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (New York: Columbia University press, 2005) in Halapid 13:1 (Winter 2006) 4–5, along with an accompanying review by Lavender of Yaakov Kleiman, DNA & Tradition: The Genetic Link to the Ancient Hebrews (Jerusalem: Devora Publishing, 2004) in Halapid 13:1 (Winter 2006) 15. Also see Abraham D. Lavender, “Identity and DNA Testing” Halapid 13:3 (Summer 2006) 1, 8–10.

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psychology of the two groups who have lived so close to one another they overlap in many vital areas of their mentalities. (iii) the deep relationship between the styles of santos, songs, and disciplinary practices that show creative developments virtually unique to the region, including what is missing or at least de-emphasized in Marian worship. These facets of religion are more than just affective supplements and they are not quite what José Faur refers to when he sees them as analphabetic signs of primitive thinking or mētis. They are, we have been trying to explain, aspects of midrashing. Modern academic scholarship on the Penitentes, as we have showed through the early chapters of this book, tends to come through folklore studies and local history, whereas my own approach — here and in other books and articles — would be at once more (a) phenomenological, (b) rhetorical, (c) art historical, and (d) dramatic, as well as (e) psychohistorical. That is, in order to understand the motivation, the performance and the effects of such midrashing, I began as though I could see: • what was actually done, said, imagined, conceived, felt, and effected; this is not easy to do because what we see today is not necessarily what was done a hundred years ago, or two or three hundred years ago; and what is recorded comes through biased eyes, or camouflaging pens, and the terms used fifty or a hundred years ago are not precisely what we would write in today; • how it is motivated by things experienced and things at work in "the history of long duration" (l’histoire de la longue durée) below the surface of group and individual awareness; this is not the same thing as a psychoanalyst’s reference to the unconscious or the subconscious, since those technical terms have to do with repression and censorship, whereas here we would be dealing with changes that occur so slowly over several generations that most people are not able to take notice, and very quickly, as we see happening in our time with great rapidity, new terms, ideas, and objects both replace parts of culture so completely most young people are unaware that there has been any change and older folk quickly forget what they used to know; and, even more strangely than these replacements, certain cultural spaces are simply closed up, forgotten, and seem never to have been, whereas new spaces — words, concepts, actions, and even objects — appear where people used never to suspect or seek out anything but blankness, silence, and oblivion; • how, missing sacramental action from the clergy, ordinary people reconstituted worship in the images, gestures, and mental patterns they recalled seeing, hearing and feeling in the baroque past or even prior to the Tridentine Reforms; this is a key factor in that it suggests that, instead of 392

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•

a rebelliousness or a regressive lapse into outmoded ideas, values and behaviours, the groups we are talking about developed whole new ways of thinking, seeing, feeling and acting from points in history where they were cut off; that is, they did not stand still or spiral backwards into primitive codes, but progressed in response to the new conditions they lived in and using the resources available to them; how they enacted, embodied, and transformed themselves into a living and moving image of the most powerful divine moments to empower all their other pastoral, communal and psychological needs — creating too an idealized, ritualized family relationship that includes past, present and future for individuals and groups.

But gradually, over the course of years, it became more evident that there was little to be seen of this kind, at least little that was not already written and spoken about in books and articles that were not convincing to me. Why? On the one hand, it would be almost meaningless just to prove that all the selfflagellation, the dramatic celebrations of Tieneblas, the veneration of sacred images and so on are Roman Catholic, and precisely that sort of post-Council of Trent Catholicism and later nineteenth-century Romantic version that the western Enlightenment thinkers and Protestant polemicists, found most threatening to their inward-turning and rationalistic faith or secularizing tendencies. Everything the Penitentes are reputed to do and believe can be found elsewhere in pre-nineteenth-century Catholicism, not least in Spain and its vast Empire. The strong anti-Catholic feelings in Protestant America were mixed with racialist prejudices, not just against the Hispanics in the newly integrated territories of the Southwest, but also against Irish and Polish immigrants to the New World. Sometimes it is hard to separate out the religious biases in antiPenitentes writing in local newspapers, missionary tracts, and court records from prejudices arising from social, commercial and criminal statements made about ignorant, uneducated and superstitious Mexicans. Jealousies, rivalries and competition for resources often led to wild assertions in political speeches and journalistic reports. Internal disputes between Catholic clergy also led to intemperate remarks and intolerant actions on both sides. On the other hand, the particular choices, disposition, and pattern of emphases in the Penitentes seem increasingly different from the rest of Latin America and Iberia. Something special and highly creative was going on. The activities were anything but savage or unsophisticated or disorderly. This doesn’t mean current members of the Hermandades or their parents or grandparents and so on had to have set about doing all this with conscious deliberation and a drawn-up masterplan. Special inner dynamics and unique external forces were at work. But what were they? How did such developments occur “under the radar” of normal historical awareness? 393

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For the few in number but extraordinary in proportion New Christians in the territories of the new northern Mexico all this would be experienced in even more complex ways, perhaps without — though I doubt it — the large majority of Penitente brothers being completely aware of this. But neither the former Jewish conversos sometimes four or more generations down the line from the original baptism nor the Old Christians who embraced them in the community would be able to articulate this, since they all lacked the benefit of hindsight and secular objectivity, but they very may well feel compassion, empathy and — when the need for secrecy and disguise became urgent as the authorities and the tourists and the journalists and the reformers closed in with condescension and hostility — a joint need to reinforce one another’s mutual spirituality. That’s why I think the hostile and sensationalist reports are so important. They rub against the grain. They expose raw nerves. They don’t understand but they sense things that are as true and as important as the beliefs expounded in the songs and ceremonies, regularized in the documents of incorporation and organization. They see things, and though they distort them — or maybe because they distort them, we can see what is otherwise not usually noticed. Taking all these matters into account, we can conclude that the Brotherhood in southern Colorado and in New Mexico is indeed unique, though it obviously is (a) Catholic, that is, not heretical, because it conforms to all those characteristics that marked the faith prior to the Reforms at the Council of Trent and through the various promulgated dogmas of the nineteenth century, even if the Penitentes’ articulation is now old-fashioned, and worrisome to mainline parishioners and clergy; (b) Hispanic, that is, composed almost completely by members whose ancestors came from old Mexico during the late seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, with very few Native Americans or later Anglo settlers; (c) crucial to the community bonds and well-being, or at least up to the last few decades, that is, in the absence of ecclesiastical pastoral care or monitoring by hierarchical agents of the Franciscans, Jesuits, or regular priesthood — ruled from Mexico City, Sante Fe, or elsewhere, including the French and Italians who arrived in the course of the nineteenth century, the Brotherhood itself stepped into the breaches, protected the community, and developed its own identifying characteristics. While these three factors are not unusual throughout the Hispanic world in either Mexico or Central and South America, there are other aspects of the Penitentes that mark them off as unique. These markers have been evident since 394

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the earliest settlement of immigrants in the late sixteenth century, though they did not all at once form about a regulated set of sodalities or cofradias. They can be traced back to European traditions through several routes, including the Third Order of the Franciscans, lay fraternities associated with various saints and liturgical celebrations in the Church, but are not specific continuations of any. What is unique about the Penitentes therefore would be that: (d) It is distinct from priestly celebrations. There is no Mass said, no Eucharist or other sacraments performed, and therefore what is done by the brothers is either supplemental or substitutive. (e) Its powerful group-generated sacredness is built on shared experience in the sufferings of Christ, but this performance also taps into far more fundamental experiences that transform individuals and the whole group. (f) Its mutual care for members and their families is based on these spiritual bonds, and its function in the community depends on the brotherhood and the rituals being exclusive, secretive and oppositional — though these are the very aspects now denied, and perhaps also hidden from authorities. (g) Its secret strength in the shared history of painful independence from hostile ecclesiastical and state agencies makes it possible to bind together two very separate groups with distinct historical reasons for supporting each other. Then I would add such matters as (h) From the earliest records in the 1590s, the brotherhood is marked by an integration into the Hispanic community of a larger than usual proportion of New Christians. (i) This willingness to protect the other “others” from inquisitorial persecutions reinforced the original group’s needs to escape into the wilderness of the far north, (j) The morada and the territory it serves is a place for private interpretations of disciplinary passion for those brothers who maintain the memory and identity of their once Jewish ancestors. This strange place that we find the Penitentes hiding themselves and through the act of hiding and being welcomed transforming into an even more bizarre place has to be set into a larger geographical and chronological perspective. We have started to do this in the earlier chapters of this book. Now it is time to step back even a few more paces, look at what is there, and then, as we have done several times already, smash apart the superficial appearance, the surface image, the illusion that both familiarity of false consciousness and the social pressures of professional history have created. 395

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IN SEARCH OF THE BIZARRE AND THE UNCANNY It seems to me that — and I am willing to be wrong with this assertion — the entire chain of tradition works as a tennis game, with a sight modification. Its intention is not to beat the opponent, but to keep the ball within the court. Each player must complement the other. The ball never travels at the same speed and point in space, as it constantly changes according to the need of the game, yet it is kept within the court. — David Ramírez6 The argument moves from point to point, directed by the inner logic of argument itself. A single place of discourse is established. All things are leveled out, so that the line of logic runs straight and true . . . Under sustained inquiry we always find a theoretical issue, freed of all temporal considerations, and the contingencies of politics and circumstances. — Jacob Neusner7 I am both Jewish and Catholic. My mother’s side’s ancestors are through the line of Diego de Vargas, who was the leader of the third group of colonists [to New Mexico] from Andalusia in Spain. We were an old Jewish family . . . We were from Ranchos de Taos and the Mora valley since the seventeenth century. The family were farmers and Penitentes. Grandmother was in the women’s Penitente society called the Carmelitas. They prepared food and took care of the moradas. — Richard Valdez8 The Rambam (Shoresh II) notes that both the inner and outer meanings are both True at the same time . . . — Daniel Eidensohn9

Stanley M. Hordes attempts to answer the nay-sayers (led by Judith Neulander) with an intense historical survey of the available archival data.10 The people playing this game, it seems, do not know the rules, or even recognize they 6 7

8

9

10

David Ramírez, “Sephardim” p. 5. Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); cited by David Ramírez, “Sephardim” p. 5. Cited by Cary Herz, New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews: Image and Memory (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2007) p. 41. Daniel Eidensohn, “Allegorization of Halom Yaakov [Jacob’s Dream]” Avodah Mailing List Volume 03 Number 129 (17 July 1999). Stanley M. Hordes. To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Hews of New Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

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are playing in a game that started a long time ago. They seem unaware of the fact that, first, the people they are writing about are not fools, nor were their ancestors. Second, they err in assuming that the game was merely to escape persecution from the Inquisition, and overlook the fact that it was also from the Jewish communities secretly operative in Mexico City and a few other large towns in New Spain, as well as in the lands of the Sephardic Diaspora. Third, they misread the intentions of the anousim racing to the deserts of the north as an escape from Catholicism, let alone from Judaism, when it was, as we have already started to show and will continue in these last chapters to argue, that it was a deliberate — if mistaken — decision to force the issue of clarification, sanctification, and restoration of Israel; that they were, in other words, still playing the same game as the Sages began when they redacted the Mishnah, the game of keeping Judaism (the Law of Israel) alive after the Fall of the Temple, the crushing of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel, and the dispersal of the remnant of the People of Israel. Seth D. Kunin of the University of Aberdeen School of Theology writes in a Preface to Hordes’ study of the Crypto-Jews in New Mexico, that “In this volume, Hordes presents a detailed and documented historical analysis that conclusively demonstrates the movement of individuals descended from Jewish families from Spain and Portugal to Mexico and, subsequently, New Mexico and other parts of the New World.” Such a study, Kunin adds, “lays the foundation for the anthropological and sociological research that is also under way.” It is, without a doubt, a complex topic, and “[t]his complexity is no doubt the hallmark of current Crypto-Judaism; it challenges any approach that seeks pure ‘Jewish’ forms.” While I am deeply indebted to Hordes for the historical research evidenced in this book, I too have several difficulties with it — not because I take Neulander’s side, that the evidence is insufficient to justify the case for further study; but because, once the facts are in that prove that a substantial number of conversos of all varieties — sincere Roman Catholics, Crypto-Jews, confused Marranos, and cynical merchants unconcerned about religious controversies — came to New Spain, we cannot say very much about what they knew, felt, believed or cared about their rabbinic backgrounds until the recent surge of interest. It will not be in current historiographical protocols or in the kinds of anthropology (including folklore) or sociology presently practiced that the answers will be found. Nor will the latest tack in the voyage — the investigation into DNA as a tool to enhance genealogical research — take us where we want to go. There can no longer be any doubt that many people who came from Iberia to New Spain and into New Mexico, southern Colorado, and Arizona were Sephardim by ancestry and also by what the Inquisition and various state institutions called tainted blood, la mancha. What is in question remains how many, for how long and in what ways remained cognizant of their Jewishness, 397

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either simply by virtue of their constant suspicion in the eyes of the Church and their neighbours (Sartre’s argument that Judaism has survived mainly because of anti-Semitism) or by means of some other attachment (ranging from an almost essentialist, genetic argument through more intellectual and spiritual choices made and re-made in every generation). This goes way beyond simplistic arguments that because someone felt more comfortable putting on clean underwear at sundown of Friday or gagged when eating shellfish or pork they were ipso facto heretics, judaizers. Many individuals and families preserved small customs, habits of behaviour, domestic arrangements, and similar tics of speech or dress without any comprehension of a Jewish aspect. But then, other personality traits, intellectual habits, and moral or spiritual propensities may indicate awareness of fundamental otherness to the Christian culture all around, whether or not this awareness includes the designation of rabbinical, Talmudic or Jewish. Thus one of the main lapses in Hordes’ list of secondary sources are books having to do with Judaism, or more precisely Sephardic versions of Judaism, such as José Faur’s In the Shadow of History or books by Shmuel Trigano or I.S. Révah. There is no mention in the Index of Rambam or Ramban or the Maimonidean Controversies. In other words, there is no indication that the author is aware that Judaism was not a single, essential quality during the periods of crisis when Sephardic Jews were plunged into persecutions, mass conversions, and expulsions. Not to see that the subject of the study is a fluid, dynamic mass of individuals and families and not exemplars from solid chunks of shared belief and practice is to miss the point. That is why I have come to speak of Fuzzy Jews, using the term “fuzzy” to cover kinds of mathematical sets which are anomalous and unrepeatable: precisely the kind of small numbers and shifting profiles that fall below the radar screen and operate without statistical probability. That is, what social science cannot handle or positivistic historiography. Hordes gives us a stock of new data to work with as he has tracked down individuals and families and shown who came from where and went to which parts of the New World. This complements Eva Uchmany’s La vida entre el judaísmo y el cristianismo en la Nueva España and Eugenio del Hoyo’s Historia del Nuevo Reino de León (1577–1723), both of which Hordes lists in his bibliography. What we now can begin to do, with all this information, is find out how these people came to New Mexico, what they had in their heads and in their baggage — books, ideas, memories — and whether they passed on this information directly or indirectly to their children and grandchildren. We have to remember, too, that when there were non-coerced conversions (and there were many), these decisions were made for various reasons (sincere wish to become Catholic, cynical desire to get ahead in careers without the debilities of anti-Jewish legislation, strategic escape from a formal Judaism that was transforming itself into a pseudo-mythical and mystically deranged kabbalistic persecuting faith, etc.), they came at different points in the history of the Church 398

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itself (sometimes before the tensions of the Reformation/Counter-Reformation, sometimes during the Tridentine Council’s deliberations when there was some hope of reconciliation between the old religion and Protestantism, sometimes later when the new emphasis was placed on penitence, Mariology, and Jesuit education) or of the state (when Portugal was more “tolerant” and “liberal” than Spain or vice versa). Moreover, one of the features of the new post-Tridentine world in Europe was the general need for simulation and dissimulation making the New Christian’s distorted situation — constant persecution and suspicion, disguise and masking, propensities to caution and prudence at an extreme — part of the anamorphic and grotesque quality of the Baroque Era. Those who rely on archival data and archeological evidence alone miss the point that the aim of the New Christians was to prevent detection at almost all costs and using all devices the age could suggest. Just as the Inquisition used secrecy as a reason of state, so the victims and potential victims did all they could to maintain within themselves the secret of who they really were — actions that often were the very groundwork for constructing new kinds of identity. For what particularly marks those individuals and families who wound up in what is today the southwestern United States was that, not only did they usually choose not to escape from the Lands of Idolatry to the safer, more tolerant lands in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, but sometimes, after having escaped (themselves or their parents or grandparents) to those places they made their way to the Spanish territories in the New World, or divided their lives or their immediate family into parts that were in any or all of these places. Add to this, Hordes reminds us, the fact that “[the] inconsistent activity on the part of the Inquisition resulted in the production of but a fragmentary record of crypto-Jewish communities.” In this Introduction to his book, Hordes declares that among all the terms used to designate the New Christians he is to investigate, the one he will not use at all is marrano, and he gives a quick survey of the latest etymologies of the word. It is true that calling people dirty pigs is not nice at all. We don’t use words like “nigger” and “kaffir” in scholarship, and avoid it in social situations. But there are two reasons why it shouldn’t be cast out of polite and politically correct discussions. First, it was a term used by Jews and non-Jews to cast aspersions on the recent converts who were treated with hostility both by the Old Christians who despised their presence in an Iberia they wanted to remain pure of invasive and infective influences. Second, it was a term used often by authorities in various Italian states when they sought out suspicious heretics, spies, and rivals. Since the term has a historical grounding, I find it useful to make it stand for something distinct from either anousim, the nice word for forced converts who proudly claim their rights as Jews without having to go through a humiliating conversion ritual by rabbis, or Crypto-Jews, the equally polite term to honour those whose families claim to have withstood pressures to submit to assimilatory efforts by Church and State and remained Jews for hundreds of years. Marranism 399

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represents a state of confusion and indecision, but not necessarily because they were ignorant or faint/feint-hearted: it was because they were educated in Iberian universities and socialized to realize the emotional power of Catholic worship, both public and private, as well as more or less aware of biblical and rabbinical traditions, which they were also attracted to . . . yet they could not decide, or they decided different things at different points in their careers. If they were able, somehow or other, to maintain a critical attitude towards Church and Synagogue, and to see great merit in Spanish civilization, despite its slide into persecutory and discriminatory modes, then we should at least grant some respect to their position, call them Marranos, not as a badge of shame, but as an indicator of their differences. Rather than view them as grotesque sinners or weaklings, perhaps we need to see in them something that is at once creative, tragic and extremely human . . . perhaps more human than the ciphers thrown up by statistics, DNA charts and other historical graffiti.

THE WORLD BENEATH THE SURFACE OF THE WORLD An autistic memory may be defined as a memory, which precedes awareness of being put into language and its words, rather remaining on the periphery of memory, remembered by a sense or combination of senses. In this particular case it was the sense of texture and imagery of a powerful memory that also constituted an early traumatic experience. — Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin11 Early that evening the Penitentes, who led all Christian ceremonies, arrived and began praying and chanting. Sometime in the first hour, the white linen was removed and the body was lifted onto the table. El Hermano Mayor, the leader, places a yellow collar around my Padrecito’s shoulders. This item is called a sambenito . . . History tells us that in Sepharad . . . the heretics had to wear a hooded yellow sambenito signifying they were heretics. This was the Badge of Shame! — Jo Roybal Izay12

There is another way in which the Penitentes in New Mexico and southern Colorado are bizarre which supplements this discussion of their geographical, 11

12

Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin and Norman Simms, “Jihaditism? Parallels between Autism and Terrorism” Mentalities/Mentalités 22:2 (2008) 1–38. Kobrin thanks her colleague Margaret Fulton for suggesting this terminology. Cp. Dafna Yee, “Parallels between Terrorism and Domestic Violence” Mentalities/Mentalités 21:1 (2007) 69–73. Herz, New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews, p. 47.

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linguistic and cultural origins in the parts of Iberia associated strongly with the hidden Sephardim, and that is as part of a strange quality to be found within the larger dimensions of the whole northern fringe of what is today Mexico and was the southern boundary of New Spain’s most distant territory. This uncanny quality that adheres to the region, the peoples that settled there, and the customs they follow, along with the beliefs they profess, seem similar to traits indicative of a type of memory Margaret Fulton termed “autistic” and that Nancy Kobrin associates with the personality specific to Islamicist jihadism. Such a memory, on the one hand, can be paralleled to the aesthetic imagery portrayed in Proust’s A la Recherche de Temps Perdu, a novel we have referred to several times already because of its richness of implications for our study — its setting in fin-de-siècle France, with reverberations of the Dreyfus Affair and rumblings of the worse violence of Hitlerian anti-Semitism: a memory that lies dormant, forgotten, yet with all the potential to spring forth in a moment of sudden awareness, triggered by a sip of tea, a faintly heard melody, a glimpse of light through shadows on a balcony. However, this dormancy of the artistic memory can only serve as a vague foreshadowing of what is meant by autistic memory. Here both the repression of the recollection to the depths of unconsciousness occurs through traumatic events, abuses of the psyche, the body, the sense of group identity, and the return to awareness in a violent explosion of psychic opening lead to clinical or psychotic states of affect deadening, withdrawal from normal reality, severing of connectedness to caregivers, siblings, the social environment, and a sense of desperate need to re-establish conscious equilibrium through acts of violence against others or the self. With the terrorists, the explosive grasping after connectiveness — the resolution of the unbearable darkness of memory-loss — is all too literal. As Kobrin explains, “The terrorists have never achieved that level of mastery in social and interpersonal relations because they use violence as a means of relating to [the] other and that quite obviously is destructive and vicious.” In the case of the Marranos on the Moradas, memory has been repressed not only by the need for disguise and deceit over many generations, thus relegating any shadowy hints and glimmering glimpses to a mythic narrative of secret cities under the desert and hidden tunnels branching out to unimaginable other worlds, but also by painful and humiliating feelings of failure and forgetfulness, a powerful need to atone for sins too distant to be recognized except within the configured and assimilated paradigms of Catholic piety and self-discipline. Here the recollections return as somatic moments of ritualized conformity to communal aspirations and are acted out in highly overdetermined ceremonies during Holy Week. The autism that is both imposed by historical circumstances and repeated in contemporary codes of group loyalty and communal self-protection from intrusive and hostile authorities and more modern busy-bodies has often been remarked upon as signs of cultural stupidity, masochistic madness or primitive fanaticism. 401

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There is a very strange book that seems to deal with this larger problem of underworld fantasies around Monterrey, northern Mexico, a volume with three titles and in three languages.13 It is by Maria Theresa Hernández who offers a kind of “history” of that part of Mexico and the city of Monterrey which is full of mysteries and controversies, a study, she tells us, of delirio, of the delirium generated by the region’s inhabitants to explain and to deny who and what they are in a place that does not seem to be like the rest of Mexico or even the rest of Latin America — or maybe because it is more like the other places in the old Spanish Empire than anyone cares to admit. It is as though in Monterrey and the small towns and villages that surround it everyone knows what no one is really willing to own up to, such as a pervasive heritage of New Christians who may have been or even still are Crypto-Jews or maybe Marranos, that there are secret underground tunnels and chambers where rebels and revolutionaries hid and kept their families or mistresses and bastard children, and that there are other strange religious and political facets to the history of Nuevo Léon that are misunderstood by all those Mexicans and South Americans outside the most industrialized and “gringoized” city south of the Rio Grande. Strange as it seems there is something similar in literature. Albert Cohen, the Sephardic author who writes in French, but whose family in Corfu (Cephalonia, as it is named in the novels) and in Marseilles, where they took on French citizenship at the end of the eighteenth century before moving to the Greek island and its Ottoman rulers, spoke a form of Venetian dialect with aspects of judizmo, or Judeo-Espanol, tells the story of Solal Solal, son of the Chief Rabbi of the island, who runs off to France, marries into a rich aristocratic family, becomes Minister of Finance, and, then missing his family and their quaint Oriental ways, invites them to visit. Embarrassed, however, by their uncouth mannerisms, Solal, hero of the first novel14 in this series which bears his name, places the five cousins from Cephalonia, the so-called valorous ones (les valereux) to live hidden in his cellars, where he visits and feeds them. These same five cousins appear in several other novels and in each they bring into the proximity of their rich, powerful and well-assimilated kinsman the grotesque sounds and sights of the Sephardic Judaism he attempts to hide, sometimes even from himself. Yet, with the ominous clouds of World War Two and the stench of the Shoah already starting to be smelt, Solal cannot keep the secret of his true identity hidden. Whispers, pointed fingers, and grafitti on the walls tell the same truth: Down with the Jews, Death to the Jews, and Death to Solal. The cousins will not survive the Holocaust and their culture will be destroyed. 13

14

Maria Theresa Hernández. The Buried History of Nuevo León. Delirio: The Fantastic, the Demonic and the Réel (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2002 [2000]). Albert Cohen, Solal (Paris: Gallimard, 1958; orig. 1930).

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The secret tunnels and buried villages in and around Monterrey cannot be real. Or can they? All of this, if it exists — and it could exist only as fantasy in some collective delusion, or as folklore in a sustained fiesta throughout a liminal area wherein the normal rules do not apply and the masking never seems to end, or it exists as a shared psychotic state, some pathological mental disease that debilitates the inhabitants in almost every way except their economic successes. But this can also be the lacanian and post-lacanian mentality of the deconstructionists who think in terms of the réel, as indicated by Hernández’s reliance on French philosopher Michel de Certeau’s theoretical writings. In other words, when the author turns to these post-modernists of the Paris school, with their bizarre jargon, logocentrism, and desire to obfuscate, she adds another layer of mystery to the history of the northern region of Mexico. At the same time, as so often the case in these efforts to obscure and mystify, her efforts shatter the normative surfaces of the history and thus allow us to peek inside the jumbled mass of inadvertent confusion and deliberate occlusion. It is from de Certeau that Hernández takes some of her key ideas and leads her to believe that the eventual displacement of [Luis de} Carvajal [el Viejo] as governor and the annihilation of his family are closely related to the ‘secret Jewish stories’ often told in present-day Nuevo Léon. This secrecy is intensified by the contradictions of history and remaining ambiguity regarding the current-day presence of Jews in the world. The sense of danger regarding disclosure as well as the narrative’s pairing with heresy placed it in a discourse of the Other.15

The brilliance of the author’s insights here, as she tries to break away from the limitations of archival evidence by taking into serious account the folktales and fantastic anxieties of her informants, as well as her own personal and family involvement in the region’s history and culture — should not blind us, however, from noting that when she starts to write about Jews and Judaism she is an outsider with rather limited understanding of the nature of the Sephardic civilization in which the phenomena of Crypto-Judaism and Marranism exist. Her fumbling efforts prevent her from grasping the intimate connections between the secret settlers escaping from both the Inquisition and the newly-reformed and reconstituted rabbinical communities in western Europe — precisely the grasp we are attempting in this book. In addition, Hernàndez’s reliance on de Certeau, once it allows her to make this breakthrough from the gloomy depths of documentary evidence to the blinding light of a focus on deliria, leads her, not towards the Promised Land to the north, across the border where the Penitentes constituted themselves after leaving Old Mexico, but into post-structuralist and post-modernist jargon 15

Hernández, The Buried History of Nuevo León. Delirio, p. 171.

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and obfuscation. She attempts to do too much at once, and yet misses seeing the other kind of evidence that her explosive analysis actually brings into view. Hence what she writes keeps begging questions. The discourse of Jews in northern Mexico is somewhat akin to a diabolical discourse. When a discourse becomes diabolical, de Certeau tells us in The Writing of History (1988), “Its language changes status.”16

The notion is provocative but robbed of its historical thickness because what she means by “Jews” is too much at once — the essentialized Jews of Catholic prejudice and theology, the mythical Jews who are stand-ins for all sorts of other Others in Nueva Léon, the real Jews who came as pious Catholics, as CryptoJews and as Marranos with Luis de Carvajal to establish a new vice-royalty outside of the grasp of the Inquisition in Mexico City; and the Jews, usually Ashkenazi rabbis and professors that Hernández interviewed for her book. Moreover, a diabolical discourse can mean what the Inquisitors said it meant when they instigated confessions in judaizers they arrested and tortured or it can refer to what Italian witches thought they meant to say, as Carlo Ginzburg has shown in his many studies — or it can be a term of opprobrium applied to the language of dissimulation or of delirium. Hernández then goes on, citing Michel de Certeau a bit further: Significantly, during the time when El Nuervo Reino was established, the Enlightenment was taking hold over Europe. During this period, the “world transformed into space; knowledge is organized around a looking-over.” Thus there is a problem of truth when it assumes the form of an unstable place such as El Nuevo Reino.17

This is too much. The Enlightenment cannot be reduced to one ideology in any given time and place, and its influences on the problems of Judeo-Conversos goes much farther than what she sees, even though, as Miriam Bodian writes, “it is difficult to know exactly how reformation rhetoric influences cryptoJewish thinking”.18 Moreover, the shift from space to looking-over again glosses important, if sometimes rather subtle, distinctions; and generally does not situate the position from which her own judgments are being made, let alone of putative standards in seventeenth-century Mexico. Much is involved in the way Baroque aesthetics played with and sometimes re-created perceptions and conceptions of space, with regard to perspectival distance and depth, chiaroscuro manipulations of 16 17 18

Hernández, The Buried History of Nuevo León. Delirio, p. 171. Ibid, p. 171. Miriam Bodian, Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000) p. 25.

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light and darkness, and metaphysical conceits of intricate and contradictory emblematic status.19 Even then, given her limited views, Hernández falls back on surmise — or empty speculation: The ruptured society that del Canto, Carvajal, and Montemayor were leaving behind most likely created a need to continue the language of illusion. This language became even more necessary after the death of Carvajal and his family. De Certeau reminds us that a truth becomes doubtful when there is no stable basis for knowledge.20

Is it truth per se, however, or a historiographical and/or sociological institutionalization of verity at issue here? It seems that Hernández has her doubts, too, but they are surely different from those she suggests might have been experienced by the three founders of what would later become Monterrey. At the same time, though, Carvajal the Elder, who was the governor, was despised by the officials in Mexico City and betrayed to the Council of Indies, and eventually arrested by the Inquisition. Then, although he was not found guilty and executed, he was drummed out of office. Following this long ordeal, he died of exhaustion and a broken heart. This is an example of how those denounced to and arrested by the Inquisition could be tormented without actually undergoing torture or have their lives ruined without formally being subject to confiscations or other punishment. El Viejo, the elder Carvajal, should not be confused with his nephew of the same name but known as Carvajal the Younger, who did suffer directly — to the very extreme. El Mozo, along with mother and sisters, was found guilty of judaizing and eventually burned at the stake in an auto-da-fé in Mexico City — proclaiming his Judaism defiantly, even if only a Judaism concocted from materials available to him in the cells of the Holy Office, the Vulgate Bible, the instruction and conversation of friars, and the whole panoply of art, architecture and liturgy that went with the Inquisitors. He also may have had both hand-written books and remembered prayers, hymns, and comments from Crypto-Jews he had associated with before and during his stay in prison. Compared with Carvajal el Mozo, a man convicted and convinced of Judaism at the time of his death, the older man seems a dupe of his family, trapped by devious secret Jews seeking to manipulate a kind-hearted relative so as to get passage to the New World, and especially with a certificate absolving them of the need to prove their status as Old Christians: they were allowed into New Spain with virtually no questions asked by the authorities. But if we look more closely at all the nasty reports sent in against the governor, 19

20

Norman Simms, Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience (New York, Washington, etc.: Peter Lang, 2006). Hernández, The Buried History of Nuevo León. Delirio, p. 171.

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Carvajal el Viejo, we cannot really take them at face value as indications that he had a difficult personality, was a wife-beater, and disgraced himself and the crown as an exploiter of Indians. We are forced by the pressure of our current argument to see them otherwise, as a cumulative image of the typical nefarious Hebrew refracted through a series of mirrors in the fun-house of Baroque and Inquisitorial New Spain, of all those libels tricked out to charge Jews with since the Middle Ages. If somewhat later in time, as we have suggested, Luis de Carvajal el Mozo quite clearly drops the converso’s mask of Catholicism to stand proudly as a Jew before his accusers, there is a strong suggestion that he and his family all along were Crypto-Jews, and such dissimulation gives their prior discourses the quality of being diabolical in the estimation of the Church. If Carvajal the Elder, on the other hand, though he also was of a Sephardic heritage, did not practice Judaism in a secret way and used his sympathies for his secretly Jewish relatives in order to exploit their talents in his political ambitions, but was at best confused about where his religious loyalties lay and so can be considered a Marrano, then the diabolism and delirium of his discourses needs to be discussed in a rather different manner than either Hernández or de Certeau suggest. In a section that follows this, Hernández writes about the “Antecedents” in kabbalah and, surprisingly, in Cervantes’ Don Quijote, as well as in Teresa of Avila’s mystical meditations and Juan de Dios or John of the Cross’s poetry. Our first impression is: wonderful! Here is the proof that the whole converso civilization that José Faur discusses was present in northern Mexico and ready to travel north over the Rio Grande into the lands that would become the southwestern United States. But closer inspection makes us wonder if the author really understands what she is talking about. The complexities of what José Faur calls converso literature do allow the linkages between Moses de Leon’s Zohar, Cervantes’ novel, and the two mystical saints’ writings, but as significant variations on ways in which formerly Jewish New Christians could articulate and experience their new social, spiritual and epistemological positions. Following de Certeau Hernández is reductive and distortive. “The shift from Judaism to Christianity,” she writes, “creates a réel that remains alive in its pieces after it has been cut away from its home”21 Whatever this may mean, it certainly cannot accurately represent the depths of mystical, juridical and iconographical thought within the various forms of Judaism available in Iberia and Mexico — or Italy or the Levant, from whence ideas continued to flow despite the efforts of the Inquisition to stop them. Eva Uchmany has shown how deep this current was, though it was certainly neither wide nor limpid. 21

Hernández, The Buried History of Nuevo León. Delirio, p. 173.

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Making her link between Saints Teresa and John and the Carmelites turn on a possible “connotation” in Carmelite and camel as circumcision is downright silly. Hernàndez keeps missing the point — the more so as the connections are right in front of her nose. Rather than where she thinks the road leads to, the tracks need to be followed where so many conversos found refuge inside the Church, especially as monks and nuns, priests and familiars of the Inqusition. Moreover, because many of these New Christian clergy had roots deep into the controversies that split Sephardic Judaism before the persecutions of the period 1390 to 1492 — that is, the controversies between Maimonides and Nachmanides — it is likely that some of these Christian mystics believed they were becoming or remaining better Jews under the mask of Catholic mysticism than those who either faded away into assimilation as pseudo-Old Christians, or those who adapted vigorous anti-Jewish postures to prove their bona fides while thus forgoing any real connections to rabbinic morality or Christian charity, or those who lingered on against the inevitable as Crypto-Jews with less and less memory of what that entailed. Eva Uchmany, whose La vida entre el judaismo y el cristianismo en Nueva Espana Hernández refers to, points to a number of other complicating factors: that some of the secret Jewish migrants who joined with Carvajal in the northern adventure had come from Livorno or Venice with books hidden in their luggage and ideas in their minds that were part of new kind of Jewish thinking developing after the Sephardic Diaspora and that there were others who had moved away from either rabbinical Judaism and Tridentine Catholicism and were hoping that New Leon in the northernmost parts of Mexico would allow them the freedom to be neither. Therefore, it is not that Hernández does not have access to the complicating information, but that she seems not to understand the nature of such baroque circumstances and personalities. It is but a short step, perhaps with a little hop, skip and jump, to get from this notion of delirium in the endless tunnels under Monterrey and the secret caverns of literary deceit to the concept of delusion. And then, with a quick slide along the smooth surface of remembered energy, to reach delusion, child’s play and enargeia. Though use of these terms may seem quirky and irrelevant, our discussion, if we are to be true to the dynamic powers of the imagination at play in the mind of those Crypto-Jews and Marranos who joined the ranks of the Penitentes, then we must follow where the fancy leads us.

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DELUSION, CHILD’S PLAY, OR ENARGEIA {In times past,] on the ranch the children would take turns looking out for the priest. They would signal when he was arriving by shouting, “Saguen, hay viene el cura,” which means, “Pull out the saints, the priest is coming.” They would use the word cura (healer, curandera/o) instead of padre, in order not to suggest a human was a “deity.” — Israela22

In this section of Chapter VII, as we draw towards the conclusion that stands inadequately before us, I want to deal with three related topics, parts of which have already been touched on in earlier chapters. First, I want to focus more clearly on the problem of children and childrearing practices. These are matters pertinent to the problematic manner in which Crypto-Jewish and Marrano identities are passed on from generation to generation, much longer than it is usually assumed that post-traumatic stress symptoms recur and are reinforced from parent to child and then forward sometimes to grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. Here too we are talking about a whole secret culture that lasts for many hundreds of years, a culture that is not stagnant but growing, changing, developing. Second, I want to discuss how these deleria of traumatization and cultural anxiety shape the behaviour and thoughts of people who belong to the stigmatized group. Third, I want to look at how the articulation of these secretly felt and remembered pains and humiliations is institutionalized into customs that are performed in public, or at least in communal rituals, without the whole group of performers necessarily being aware of this disguised sub-group in their midst, a small sub-set of fuzzy individuals whose history, culture, language and beliefs may be completely or partly at odds with those of the dominant group.

TROUBLED CHILDREN OF THE NEW WORLD On one occasion, as a child, Berta stuck out her tongue at the priest as they were leaving church. Her aunt chastised her with, “Don’t, dear; this we only do at home.”23

Carlos Lerralde and Gregory Cuellar suggest that when the first waves of New Christians travelled from Iberia to the territories of Nueva España they 22 23

Herz, New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews, p. 51. “The woman referred to here is Berta Covos, “born and raised in a small farming town, San Elizario, Texas, formerly part of New Mexico.” According to the researcher studying her case as a key example: “We met in November 1992, and had many lengthy

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brought with them, as one would expect, all the baggage of their previous experiences and those of their ancestors who had shared the persecutions, humiliations, and harassments of the individuals who were forced to the baptism font by threats to their lives or who chose to convert for strategic, cynical or ideological reasons.24 These experiences should, by no means, be considered that of ignorant people, uneducated and weak-willed persons who converted from fear and who could then not face the probing of the Inquisition and the stigma of tainted blood. First of all, Lerrado and Cuellar remind us that those first Jewish settlers, whatever their nominal identity, “had migrated from Europe, the Azores and the Middle East,” a fact that suggests that many — who knows how many? — were returning to Spanish jurisdiction either after having escaped themselves or been brought up by parents who had fled or were expelled. Their return suggests several motives: (1) the cynical view, that they were looking for commercial opportunities and could not really care about religious choices; (2) the idealistic view, that they were coming as emissaries on behalf of the established and reestablished Jewish communities throughout the Sephardi Diaspora to help the small, scattered, and confused Crypto-Jewish groups to learn more about the ancestral faith and to help set up covert rabbinical institutions; or (3) the patriotic view, that they were more Spanish than Jewish, and no matter what their own inner feelings about Hebraic identity, they would rather live with their ancestral language and culture, even at the risk of persecution. This book has argued for at least two additional possible explanations of this mystery: (4) because they and their ancestors had already rejected the kind of Judaism that developed in Iberia based on Ramban and his disciples’ mystical anti-rationality and charismatic-persecutory leadership, they wished to find a place and a way to live as traditional Sephardic Jews, that is, as followers of Gaonic and Maimonidean rationalists; however, since such a choice was really impossible without the very open and public national institutions which are necessary to live according to talmudic Law as understood by the rabbis in old al-Andalus, the best they could hope for was (5) a journey into the wilderness to purge themselves of the idol worship and irrationality operative both in the established Church and Synagogue, one known from long experience under Spanish rule, the other from recent experience in Italy, North Africa and other places where the refugees has sought refuge. This last choice is the most speculative of all, and it is implied only indirectly through the midrashing of the liturgy and disciplina of the Penitentes. In that sense, the enthusiastic

24

conversations between November 1993 and August 1994. Our conversations covered everything Schulamith C. Halevy, “Manifestations of Crypto-Judaism in the American Southwest”. Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 18:1–2 (1996) 68–76. Carlos Lerralde and Gregory Cuellar, “The Mexican Inquisition in Nuevo Leon, 1550–1821” Halapid 13:2 (Spring 2006) 4–5, 14.

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throwing off of the remnants of the lost world of old-fashioned Jewishness into a community of Catholics also cut off from the Church and searching for a radical return to the most immediate (primitive, in the theological sense) experience of Christian penitential self-discipline, was a wild messianic wish. It was something crazy and antinomian, a bizarre search for the breath of holy madness that sometimes comes over a people. But like the rest of the Spanish migrants who followed in the wake of the Conquistadors, these conversos who helped to reproduce in the New World the same social structures and religious boundaries that existed in the Old, also experienced a new phenomenon: the children born in Mexico did not reproduce exactly the social characters and personalities of their parents. Native-born Mexican crypto Jews appeared different from their old-world parents and grandparents, who revealed the stunted emanations of Spanish internal turmoil and bitter conflicts with the Moors. The children born in the new world were well fed, cradled in sunshine and tall as cornstalks. They had a peculiar accent, however, which lacked the euphony of a standard Spanish idiom but retained a Spanish idiom and the pronunciation of another era.25

Others, including contemporary Hispanics claiming to be the progeny of these early anousim, also remark on some of these features, attributing the peculiar accent (a) in some instances to a high-born (hidalgo) status, which researchers explain as an attempt to avoid the racial opprobrium accorded to persons of either Native American blood or mixed-blood Mexican immigrants in the United States, (b) in other cases with a more accurate historical perspective to the high probability that most of these original colonists had come from Portugal or border regions of Castile or Galicia close to Lusophone districts directly or indirectly, or (c) in still other examples based on a greater focus on Sephardic tradition which would see in these speech mannerisms a substrate of Judeo-Español. On the whole, though, such a broad generalization may idealize the actual situation for the succeeding generations, insofar as, at least in the case of the families that would travel to the farthest northern fringes of New Spain, there continued to be a desire to separate oneself from any organized Crypto-Jewish worship community, as in Mexico City, Vera Cruz and perhaps Monterrey, as much as from the Inquisition and its agents. Be that as it may, Lerralde and Cuellar at this point in their brief but provocative essay cite Seymour B. Liebman: “The new immigrants created not only a revival of learning and ritual observance but also the beginning of a definite Jewish community.”26 This assertion is true, to a certain extent, but 25 26

Lerralde and Cuellar, “The Mexican Inquisition” 4. Seymour B. Liebman, The Jews in New Spain: Faith, Flame and Inquisition (Coral Cables, FL: University of Miami, 1970) p. 20; cited in Lerralde and Cuellar, “The Mexican Inquisition” 4.

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needs much modification in order to encompass the varieties of Sephardic Judaism that could be revived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the kind of myths and legends extant in and around Monterrey, it is probable that any learning and observance regularized by a relatively strong community would have been based on the mystical and emotive qualities associated with Ramban and Zohar. Individuals and families who chose to flee from these kinds of secret Jewish enclaves and establish themselves in what is now the southwestern United States were either seeking be rid of all influence of organized religion or hoping to preserve what memories they had of classical Sephardic tradition, that based on figures such as Saadya Gaon and the Rambam. In such a speculation, however, we have to recall that these putative rationalists knew they would be unable to follow the Law and perform any but the most symbolic versions of the mitzvoth, and thus are most likely to be New Christians with a modern liberal avant la lettre sense of internalized, relativistic and skeptical Judaism. In other words, they were much more likely to be Marranos than Crypto-Jews, confused rather than devious. Whatever the choices made in Monterrey, where the Inquisition was soon operating with sufficient vigour to keep the conversos in a nearly continuous state of anxiety, with the consequence that their children, instead of developing healthy and normal personalities, as Liebman suggests, life would have proved fraught with neurotic stresses — and hence the constant flourishing of stories about underground cities and secret conclaves. On the other hand, among those New Christians who travelled as far north as they could go and found themselves settled in small, rural, isolated villages and hamlets, and among Old Christians and Indians who, while probably unsophisticated enough to ignore or at least unaware of the tensions hidden inside the lives of their Sephardic neighbours, children could grow up far less worried than their parents by the fears of the Inquisition and the Statutes of Purity of Blood. At the same time, these children, though poor and lacking in formal educational opportunities, could grow up free from most of the old anxieties, were also recipients of their parents’ individual and collective trauma: aware to some extent of the need for family solidarity and secrecy, partly distrustful of all figures of formal authority and to a lesser extent of their friends and community leaders, and proud too of the memories of their grandparents and earlier ancestors who endured so much — and were once highly educated and respected members of their own Jewish communities and the Spanish cities and kingdoms they served. It is likely that specific parts of the family tradition included specialist roles to be played in the new population of which they were a part, as healers, singers, and communicators. If these new generations eventually found themselves, when the direct links to Spain, Portugal and 411

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other parts of the Sephardi Diaspora were lost, facing “the awesome, lonely terrain inhabited by Indians,”27 they did not do so in the same way as their Old Christian associates did. José Faur points out that Jewish converts brought with them to the New World and into new generations attitudes which were far more tolerant than those in the wider Spanish world and particularly in theological terms, for the Jewish view of Indians, Blacks and other non-Europeans tended to be more accepting and respectful because all these kinds of people were the children of the same God and were to be judged, less on their customs and beliefs regarding religious matters, than on their ethical behavior according to the Noachic Code.

DELUSIONS IN THE NEW WORLD Some people, understanding rabbinic hermeneutics superficially, think of it as neglecting the mind; but the intention of the signified by the signifier is not the only way of indicating significance. In its other modes, the significance of the signifier responds only to the mind that seeks it, thus becoming part of the process of signification; interpretation necessarily includes that seeking without which the non-said, inherent in the texture of what is declared, would be extinguished by the weight of the texts and sink into their letters. — Emmanuel Levinas28

The delusions and bizarre behaviour of the Penitentes, compounded as we have seen by the members and performers who were New Christians, have to be understood in several ways: (a) not least as part of the generally anxietyridden culture that developed throughout Christendom in the wake of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, especially among Catholics who came increasingly to seek reinforcement of the dogmas imposed at Trent and by Papal bull; (b) in terms of the mystical, messianic and visionary trends within Judaism that moved from kabbalistic myths to Lurianic cosmography and climaxed in the Sabbatean fiasco of the failed false messiah; and (c) in the peculiar circumstances of those places where the Penitentes emerged as 27 28

Lerralde and Cuellar, “The Mexican Inquisition” 5. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Jewish Understanding of Scripture,” trans. Joseph Cunneem, Cross Crurrents 44:4 (1994–95) 497; cited in Michelle M. Hamilton, “The Libro de buen amor: Work of Mudejarismo or Augustinian Autobiography?” eHuamnistica 6 (2006) 26.

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a distinct brotherhood out of the range of normative ecclesiastical and civil governance and in the bizarre conditions of former Jews who participated whole-heartedly in the communities and their disciplinary rituals. In his account of the history of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron of Mexico, Francis Johnson cites Estrella de la Norte concerning the response of the ecclesiastical officials to a great flood that inundated the City of Mexico in 1629. It was decided to bring the image of the Holy Image of Our Lady from the church where it had been placed following the apparition to Juan Diego in 1521 in Tepeyac to the capital of New Spain. The translation of the icon was a major event involving large numbers of people and boats. They removed the Virgin from above the altar where she had been enthroned during the last hundred years or so, and installing her in the felucca of the Archbishop, together with the most important persons in his retinue, they rowed her into Mexico City. There was a great display of lights in all the vessels, and music from bugles and flageolots. The choir of the Cathedral also sang psalms and hymns, but with more harmony than joy, because though they were full of trust in the company of the Virgin from whom they hoped for a remedy, they were not altogether happy.29

It is important to note the large numbers of people, the lavish display of wealth and hierarchical order, and the play of lights and music, both choral and instrumental. Above all, we are told, there was a sense of anxiety; for though the assembly had great faith in the Lady of Guadalupe, they were still in a state of shock, grief and fear at the time of the floods. This night procession on water is characteristic of mid-seventeenthcentury Tridentine Catholicism in Spanish America. It also shows qualities associated with Baroque art in general and, in terms of the chiaroscuro and lavish play of supernatural intensity, of the mannerist phase. However, the next section of the Estrella de la Norte that Johnston cites, makes clear the striking difference between a modern sensibility and that which defines this period and this mentality. When the flotilla had arrived at a short distance from the parish church of Saint Catherine the Martyr, that wise and prudent maiden, in the person of her statue, went out to receive the Blessed Lady . . . She embarked on the vessel and accompanied the Virgin for the remainder of the journey, afterwards receiving her in the church which was her own home, where the distinguished visitor was entertained with affectionate and reverend demonstrations on the party of the clergy, who were likewise richly robed for the occasion; and from the church she proceeded to the 29

Cited in Francis Johnston, The Wonder of Guadalupe: The Origin and Cult of the Miraculous Image of the Blessed Virgin in Mexico (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1981) p. 74.

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Episcopal palace, the birthplace of the miraculous image, where she was hospitably received for the night.30

In one sense, the description follows a common trope in which the procession is to be seen as though from a divine perspective through the eyes of faith, in that the two statues of the Virgin and Catherine are treated as the saints themselves. Catherine “in the person of her statue, went out to receive the Blessed Lady.” But in another sense, the narrator slips from a description of the festive events that took place as a church procession on water to a magical (“miraculous”) vision of the two saints operating without human agency, although venerated by the clergy and lay-folk following their every move across the lake and into the church. It is not that the Mexican chronicler or Francis Johnston are not aware that these statues are works of art that are carried by devout men and decorated with materials created by local craftsmen and women in honor of the saints. What is significant is that he writes as though they were not idols but embodied sacred objects. To the outsider this is either madness — a delusion of walking-talking statues — or a form of regressive infantile play. It looks like adults playing with dolls. This kind of insight is limited by the banality of its own expression. That is why we need to return to the more sophisticated examples of high literature and culture. Our next example (which we introduced earlier in this book) is therefore the episode in Cervantes’ Don Quixote when the hero of this strange book makes his descent into the Cave of Montesinos. It is a literary adventure that is central to the second part of the great converso-Spanish novel, but also a variation on a traumatic dream within the collective anxiety of Jews separated from their national communities, rabbinical institutions, and sensorysupportive practice of traditional mitzvoth. While these kinds of public expressions of inner trauma precede the full development of Lurianic Kabbalah and the formation of Sabbatian antinomian messianism, a phenomenon fraught with “strange words and deeds”, they are striking evidence of the almost miraculous existence of such visions in times and places where contiguity seems impossible to trace.

30

Johnston, The Wonders of Guadalupe, pp. 74–75. Italics mine.

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CHILDREN’S GAMES AND DELUSIONS Being Jewish taught me how to laugh! First and foremost to laugh at myself and my situation. More important, to laugh in order to act in the world. That is not to say we are to make fun of someone or make light of our fate. Rather, one is not to take oneself too seriously, but to take one’s responsibilities very seriously. — Na’ama Kelman31

This delusion begins not with an adult’s conversion to a new faith or a remembered family history of such a traumatic transformation, but rather in the confusions and anxieties of a troubled childhood. It begins with the child who finds him or herself growing up in an environment of mistrust, distress, constant fears of stability disappearing, the ground disappearing from beneath her feet.

CHILDREN AMONG THE MARRANOS: A PSYCHOHISTORICAL PROBLEM I remember as a child my parents debating whether to bring a tutor to help me in Latin, the language of tum’a. — José Faur32

While more and more studies of the Crypto-Jewish/Marrano33 phenomenon have appeared in the last few decades than ever before, perhaps few, if any, can overcome the core problem of dealing with the emotional life of the individuals and groups caught up in the ordeal of living in a society unable to understand

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33

Na’ama Kelman is “a rabbi and descendant of ten generations of rabbis who in 1992 became the first woman rabbi to be ordained in Israel.” This comment comes from her contribution to I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections on the Last Words of Daniel Pearl , ed. Judea and Ruth Pearl (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2004), a collection of essays written in memory of Daniel Pearl.. Faur, “Don Quixote: Talmudist and mucho más,” p. 139, n. 2. On the concept of tum’a (halachic impurity) see Rav Moshe Taragin “Talmudic Methodology” YESHIVAT HAR ETZION ISRAEL KOSCHITZKY VIRTUAL BEIT MIDRASH (VBM). For an interesting historical and literary view on these terms, see Constance H. Rose, “Alfonso de Ulloa, Ariosto and the Word Marrano” Revue de literature comparée 45 (1971) 565–572.

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or accept their fuzzy personalities.34 There all too often is a failure by most scholars — and I use this word advisedly — to take into account the emotional, psychological and psychohistorical attributes of the Jews, New Christians, and Crypto-Jews caught up in a variety of very difficult and threatening social, political, economic, and ethical situations. In other words, though there are passing references to families, women, children, childrearing, and mental states, there is no real attempt to grapple with the problem of how to interpret written, visual and tactile texts in order to see and understand what it was like to be a Sephardic refugee, a victim of the Holy Office, or a perpetually wandering and insecure individual at this crucial period. Attention is usually paid to the mentalities of the victims and victimizers — perhaps in a way all of Iberian society35 — but still not to the specific psychohistorical experiences and ontological situations, except in passing because, actually, when we do turn our attention to the primary documents, there is evidence, even if it often requires subtle teasing part and skilful analysis. From time to time, a word like “fear” is mentioned, but not the dynamics and strategies of what caused it, whether aggressive persecution or social “neglect.”36 Emotional states are not explored, and the effect on the interpersonal relationships in the household — especially the nursery and the bedroom — are quickly or quietly passed over. How can fear and distrust become the dominant features of intimate marital relations and childrearing without distorting the whole personality structure of the children who grow up in such households? Or again, when the word “child” or “parent” appears, the implications are left hanging, whether an infant or toddler or a grown son or daughter, and the qualities of affective growth are not discussed. There is, however, one recent study which comes close to the approach we are proposing. In a recent collection of essays from a scholarly conference,37 Nathan Wachtel discusses “Marrano Religiosity in Hispanic America 34

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For a full discussion on the use of “fuzzy” to describe unusual, erratic sets or groups, see Norman Simms, A New Midrashic Reading of Geoffrey Chaucer: His Life and Works (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004) pp. 25–40. Joseph Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition: A History, trans. Janet Lloyd (London: Profile Books, 2004 [2002]) Anthony Judge “Varieties of Terrorism Extended to the Experience of the Terrorized” Laetus in Praesens (16 September 2004) online at http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/ docs00s/varterr. What is left out of this article, however, although it does provide a brief glimpse of non-Christian concepts, is the historical depth we try to give. An important element in the generation of terror — fear, anxiety, dread, etc. — is that rhetorical need for (a) shocking images as the basis of mnemonic recollections, (b) threats or actual performance of painful acts to embed events into the mind of witnesses, and (c) strikingly unexpected scenes or words of horror that cancel out previous memories and make space for the new persuasive vividness or enargaeia. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, eds., The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800. New York and Oxford: Bergham Books, 2001. xix + 567 pp.

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in the Seventeenth Century,”38 making clear that the task is to avoid reductive schemas “and instead restore to marrano religiosity its full measure of complexity and diversity.” (p. 149). Note that Wachtel speaks of religiosity and not religion since there is no theological doctrine at play: “but rather a set of concerns, practices, and beliefs grouped together in a configuration made up of various, even contradictory, elements whose diversity does not preclude a kind of unity — a generic style that makes it possible for us to identify and label it with a specific term, in this case ‘marrano’” (p. 150).39 In this way, Marranism is different — although not always very different from — Crypto-Judaism, since in this last case there is an attempt to reproduce and develop a kind of doctrinal aspect of Judaism secretly under the cover of New Christian beliefs and practices in public. In this way, we move from the general term “Sephardic” for all sorts of Judaism originating in the Iberian culture zone to New Christian or converso for those who were either forcibly or voluntarily converted to Catholicism, and then to a gamut of types of persons who could not make the self-transformation from Jewish to Christian smoothly, with Crypto-Jews designating those with a conscious effort to maintain their Jewishness through a number of Marrano types who with more or less awareness maintained some Judaizing tendencies and then those who rejected and denied this Jewish background as much as possible but were nevertheless held under suspicion by church and state authorities.40 Wachtel goes right to the key problem of childrearing and family relations.41 His discussion requires our sustained attention, both for what it says and for what is left in silence. “By definition,” he writes, “the conversos had received some Christian education that had inevitably left traces, even to the point of stamping their personalities with indelible mental reflexes” (p. 150). But what exactly does he mean by “traces” and “reflexes”? He seems to focus on conscious and linguistic elements, rather than exploring the psychiatric dimensions — the questions at the heart of modern studies in brain anatomy, genetic expression in response to environmental conditions, and, associated with that, rapid changes 38

39

40

41

The essay was translated from French by Jennifer Curtis Gage, and the Spanish documents were englished by Carrie Chorba. The fullest discussion of these ideas appears in Nathan Wachtel, La foi du souvenir: labyrinthes marranes (Paris: La Librairie du XXIe siècle/Seuil, 2001. See also my Review Essay: “Marranos: Anamorphosis of Culture”, reviews of Nathan Wachtel, La foi de souvenir, Joseph A. Levi, ed., Survival and Adaptation: The Portuguese-Jewish Diaspora in Europe, Africa and the New World, Shmuel Trigano, ed., Le Juif caché: Marranisme et modernité, and Andrée Aelion Brooks, The Woman Who Defied Kings: The Life and Times of Doña Gracia Nasi in Mentalities/Mentalités 18:1 (2003) 81–84. For a discussion of these subtle distinctions, see José Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (New York: SUNY Press, 1992) pp.41–53. The importance of families rather than individuals or communities is stressed both by I.S. Révah and his posthumous editor in Antonio Enríquez Gómez: un écrivain marrane (v. 1600–1663) (Chandeigne: Péninsules, 2003).

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in genetic make-up. For what he is talking about are traumatic impacts on the child, from the foetus in the womb through the infant in its mother’s arms through the toddler absorbing cultural signals through the speech-acts and domestic rituals of the family and then the way young children and adolescents become integrated into the community as they achieve affective and cognitive independence. These “traces” and “reflexes” are thus more than linguistic tics and behavioural quirks; they are actual neuronal connections and hormonal triggers in the brain that are modifiable by physiological and psychological experiences. Wachtel cites an instance of a fourteen-year-old girl, Leonor de Caceres, who is recorded in an Inquisition record as recalling an argument in her household over her education. To begin with, neither the officers of the Holy Office nor Wachtel mention that she is an adolescent going through puberty at this time, a point which is all important in gauging the impact of this episode on her personality development. One day, in the presence of the said Doña Mariana (who was quite crazy) and the said Doña Anna, Antonio Diaz fought at length with [her mother] Doña Catalina because she made her [Leonor] fast during the holy days of the Lord and he ordered her [Leonor] to get dressed, saying, “Stand up, you bad woman of poor breeding, and do not ever return to this house” and so Ysabelica china who is now dead, dressed her and she went with her father down the street corner where she said to the said Antonio Diaz, “My Lord and father, where are you taking me so that I might cry in someone else’s home?” and the said Antonio Diaz responded, “Be quiet, you sly vixen of poor breeding. I am taking you to Machado’s house.” And she knew not who he [Machado] was, she cried, and the said Antonio Diaz shed tears when he heard her ask where he was taking her so that she might cry in someone else’s home, and he took her back to her mother’s house, saying, “Go on, you poorly bred woman and thank God for what you said to me, for it is because of this that I am taking you to this bad woman,” and her father, the said Antonio Diaz, left her at the door and went about his business. (p. 151)

As this passage is recorded from the perspective of the Inquisitors, the problem seems to be that the father has yelled at the mother for making Leonor fast on a Christian holiday, a custom likely to be seen as Judaizing by familiars of the Inquisition or local malsinos (malicious informers) and Antonio has tried to take his daughter out of the house to get her away from the mother and the servants listening to the argument. But Leonor begs her father not to shame her by having her weep in some stranger’s house: this also seems to be a typical complaint of overly-sensitive adolescent girls. Wachtel interprets the event as an example of mistrust in the Marrano household, in which the father seems to be angry because his wife is bringing up his daughter to follow Christian ways and, yet, at the same time, endangering the Christian reputation of the household in a paranoid society. 418

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The historian must attempt to listen through the text of the intrusive document with its prejudices against Judaizers. We are also hearing in this text, however faintly, an account by Leonor given many years after the event, when at least one of the servants is dead. The father insults Doña Catalina, calling her “mala hambra de mala casta.” She is a bad woman of bad breeding. Later he repeats only the first part of the insult. The key question is how literally such harsh words should be taken, or more poignantly, how serious and of what nature is the father’s anger? He certainly endangers the family’s safety by arguing in front of the servants, any of whom could now or in the future report the New Christians to the Inquisition, revealing that he doesn’t approve of the mother’s attempt to bring Leonor up as a believing Catholic. If so, why does he take his daughter out of the house immediately, but then, when she says she will cry in front of Machado — a person she does not know, and whom the text does not identify — does he bring her back home? Why does he not go on to Machado’s house? Is he afraid that Leonor will throw a tantrum there and that will shame him or put him into further dangers? The two shocking statements frame this event, with its own insult: “buena pieça de mala casta,” echoing the insult given to the wife, but substituting an ironically positive for a negative phrase. First, then, it seems the father loses his composure and forces Leonor to come with him out into the street. Then he brings her home, insults the mother again, and — in a somewhat ambiguous passage — says he is giving his daughter back into the hands of his wife again because of what Leonor said. The second insult may be more playful than the first, since it repeats “mala hambra” without the specific slur on her breeding. Has the father calmed down now and is he reconciled to his wife continuing with the education of the child? Much depends on how we understand what happened on the street. When Leonor says she is going to cry, is this a sign of her immaturity, and this makes the father reflect on his words and make him change his mind, so that he returns the hysterical daughter to his wife’s charge with a kind of ironically playful repetition of his insult? When Leonor does not recognize the name of Machado, is that also a sign to the father of his daughter’s immaturity and innocence, so that he is convinced he must go back home and, to save face a little, repeat his insulting words, though this time without the same anger as before? He actually does not speak to his wife and he leaves his daughter at the door, as though he were now ashamed of what he had done and is unwilling to face his wife. Has Antonio been outflanked by the women in his household, wife and daughter, to be sure, but also the three servants, one probably still alive and perhaps the informant, one mad and one now dead? There is no way to answer these questions with the information provided, no more so than to know what the word china means in relation to Ysabelica. In another example given in this same essay, Wachtel reports that “Antonio Fernandez Cardado went on to say that, as a child, in the school where he was 419

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taught by priests to read and write, he learned a prayer that the children had recited every afternoon, and he repeated it to the Inquisitors . . . ” (p. 152) This prayer which ended with an “Amen Jesus” he continues to know and recite, but he confesses that he often stops before reaching this last phrase, though at times he “unintentionally” does repeat it. Wachtel sees this Freudian slip as a “reflex”. But the argument offered stresses the conscious aspects of the phenomenon: Let us note further how Antonio Fernandez Cardado excused himself for making these slips: his real intention, he insisted was truly to pray as one who observes “the law of Moses” and to address the God of Israel exclusively. So even in private prayer he maintained a mental reservation and drew a distinction between the words he actually uttered and the faith within his heart of hearts; in other words, there was a discrepancy or gap between the prayer as literally expressed and his inner feelings, the authentic faith that alone guaranteed salvation. (p. 152)

The assumption is that both what is in his mind and in his heart are conscious, with the slip of the tongue a mere habit or mental tic without any real meaning at all. Any Freudian could tell you, however, there are no meaningless slips of the tongue; that paraplexes are breakthroughs of unconscious wishes or anxieties.42 What was taught in the school room was more than a hymn that the grown man recalls with nostalgia, careful most of the time to censure out the Christian words. The child was part of a group in a classroom that bonded him into Catholic society, probably at a time long before he was old enough to have the family’s secret revealed at home. Once that secret is revealed, Antonio is no longer innocent and at ease with himself; from then on he must maintain the double identity of the Crypto-Jew. No matter how much he gives intellectual assent to his Jewishness — and he may even relish the excitement of the need to hide things from the outside world — the hymn brings back with it a childish simplicity and coherence now absent from his life. The slips of the tongue, then, are not so much wishes that he were a Christian purely and simply and without the complications and dangers of the concealed Jewishness, but more a longing for simplicity itself, for being a child among children who trust and love their teacher. Then in a third telling example Wachtel writes of a twelve year-old child, Fernando de Medina — well, actually, he doesn’t have much to tell, as is so often the case with historians whose focus is on adult experience and conscious, intellectual activity. Fernando was born into the Marrano community of 42

Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology if Everyday Life, trans, by Alan Tyson, ed. by James Strachey with the assistance of Angela Richards and Alan Tyson. The Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 5 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975; orig. German 1901), esp. Chapter V, “Slips of the Tongue”, pp. 94–152.

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Peyrehorade in southern France,43 and he had been, as was the custom, “both baptized and circumcised” (p. 156). He lived there until he was twelve — thus the identification at the start of this paragraph — when he went to Spain: was this to accompany his parents, as one would expect, or a decision of his own, if he were a boy with some independence and rebelliousness? After twenty years, Fernando went to Mexico, and four years later was arrested by the Inquisition. I choose to identify him as a twelve-year-old, a boy on the cusp of adolescence, of puberty, because, as in the case of Leonora above, after the critical determining years of infancy, the passage from childhood to maturity is fraught with all these extra anxieties, pains, and intellectual confusions for Marranos. In the twenty years Fernando spent in Spain before emigrating to Mexico, he may or may not have lived as a Crypto-Jew, although despite himself, as his arrest in Mexico shows, he was suspected, a New Christian with likely Judaizing qualities. He would certainly have been educated as Roman Catholic, as such persons often were, and that meant, in addition to whatever professional training he received, he came to study theology to some extent. Marranos were anything but ignorant of the Catholic faith, but they were probably fairly ignorant about what any rabbinical authority would recognize as Judaism. Even if he sought during these two decades to live secretly in his heart and in his private life as a Jew, what that consisted of and what that meant to him would be confused. Had he left Peyrehorade on his own to escape from the stifling tensions of his parental home, what he would bring with him of Judaism would be fraught with guilt and shame, rage against his parents for putting him in such an untenable position and rage against himself for lacking the courage to stay in the community in which he grew up. If he were brought back to the Land of Idolatry by his mother and father, it would be evident to him, as a teenager, that his parents were weak and could not tough out the ordeal of living as Marranos in France and so went back to what they hoped was a simpler existence; yet for the boy, who may not have been equipped emotionally or intellectually to handle the abrupt change, the return to Spain would have created more tensions in his mind, partly as hatred for his elders who forced him into an even more dangerous situation than he had known and partly as hatred of the society all around him, with all its Christian institutions, that reminded him every minute of every day of what he could not belong to implicitly and without question. Yet he stayed on for twenty years, until he was thirty-two. We do not know why he went to Mexico or who went with him. He may have thought strictly in terms of financial betterment — Wachtel suggests it was to escape from debt collectors — or he 43

Problems of the conflicted personalities among Sephardim caught up in the southwest of France during this period are discussed by David L. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) esp. pp. 66ff.

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may have hoped to find some release from the tensions of being suspected all the time by going to the New World. Again, we just don’t know, and it may have been upon the advice of a friend, relative or wife. When interrogated by the Holy Office, writes Wachtel, Fernando gave “contradictory statements”. “While the Inquisitors did not hesitate to attribute his frequent sarcasm and blasphemy to intentionally feigned madness, it nevertheless seems,” according to Wachtel, “seems likely that he was indeed suffering, at least temporarily, from some mental disturbance” (p. 156). I agree, but still wonder about the sources of Fernando’s sarcasm and blasphemies, since they may be outbursts of total exasperation and cynicism after a long ordeal of resistance, hiding, and eventual giving in to pressure: not so much to tell the Inquisitors what he really believed, if he believed anything at all, but to insult them. Wachtel thinks, at least in response to questions about the destiny of the soul, the young man’s answers are clear and coherent, a materialist, if not outright atheistic philosophy. It is neither a Christian nor a Jewish answer. It is not what a cautious man would say to officers of the Church at such a time. If the interrogating panel represented for Fernando his own parents — the authority-figures in his life who betrayed him to a life of concealment and suspicion — then he finally bursts out into telling them what he thinks: that all religion is meaningless, and so their own faith and the religion they pretend to live by are worthless. He doesn’t need it, just as he doesn’t need them anymore. When he says, in the archival report, “he believed there was nothing more than the present and no sin greater than doing harm to another”, he takes the moral high ground. He doesn’t need churches or synagogues, priests or rabbis to tell him what to do or believe. But to speak so incautiously is the mark not of a thirty-two-year old man trying to avoid the wrath of the Holy Office, but of a twelve-year-old spitting in the face of his parents. In a fourth example which allows us a glimpse of the emotional life of Marranos and the experiences of Crypto-Jewish children caught in the ongoing trauma of their lives, Wachtel cites the Mexican Inquisition records on young woman named Maria de Luna y Vilachas. At the time she speaks to the court in 1648 she is eighteen-years-old and is recalling an incident ten years earlier, when she was still a young child. She recalls meeting with a family who had been summoned before the Inquisition, were reconciled, and now wore the sanbenito as a mark of penitence and shame. Maria says that she and her sisters Francisca and Petronila were friendly with the children of this family . . . because as children they had all been raised together and she remembers that about ten or more years ago, Jorge [one of the sons of that family] came across this witness in the doorway of the store where her father, Juan de Viches, held the right to sell ice, and he said to the witness, “Give me a piece of ice and I will tell you something,” and the witness, standing in the doorway, said to him, “I won’t give you any ice unless you tell me.” So the said Jorge said that his father, Duarte de León, 422

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flagellated a Holy Christ with a barbed wire whip at night in the chamber where he slept . . . and without asking any more questions, nor saying another thing to him, the witness gave Jorge the piece of ice that he had asked for. (p. 158)

Here is the imminent danger of Marranism and Crypto-Judaism from the child’s perspective. The little boy is naively willing to endanger the life of his family for the sake of a piece of ice, and the eight-year-old girl recognizes that the information is sufficiently valuable to be worth the trade. But neither child was fully able to grasp the real extent of the danger, unless we take as evidence the fact that little Maria kept this story to herself for ten years and only revealed it when she was herself put on the spot by the Inquisitors and then had either to denounce someone else not in her own family or risk being tortured for the names of people closer to her. Wachtel at this point is only interested in the meaning of the act of whipping the Crucifix, and he does not recognize the psychological function of this displaced anger by the humiliated father. We rather see as important the potential for betrayal by children of the family’s secret identity, and the way in which childish simplicity risks turning a game into catastrophe. Parents, aware of such behaviour in their sons and daughters, cannot trust them fully — and yet somehow must live as a family and try to give a sense of normality to their offspring. The father, Duarte de León, does not invite his sons into the room to participate in an anti-Catholic ritual, but performs it at night in his own bedchamber. He must not have been aware that little Jorge spied on him. As the boy grew up, however, he no doubt became sensitive to what he had done by revealing his father’s secret to Maria, and this would been burdened him with anxiety and shame. It is no wonder that, in the eyes of the Inquisitors, the Judaizers they interrogated tended to seem — and perhaps in many ways, thanks to this victimization, to be — mad.44 Though there are still almost automatic reflex reactions to the condition of the Marranos that see them completely absorbed into Spanish Catholicism within no more than two or three generations, the evidence is mounting against such a glib assertion. This is partly because we are learning to think in terms of “fuzzy” Jewishness, in other words, to see that “sets” of people do not easily square with rigid paradigmatic notions of identity, that a person is either a Christian or a Jew, not only according to the institutional definitions imposed by authorities in each religion, but also according to the conscious choices made by individuals; rather, the fuzzy categories that now come into focus allow us to see that Marranos did not always and consistently and even coherently belong to one camp or the other and, moreover, were not 44

For fuller discussion of such madness, see Norman Simms, Crypto-Judaism, Madness, and the Female Quixote: Charlotte Lennox as Marrana in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England. Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ontario, and Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004.

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consciously and intellectually aware of where they belonged at one moment of their lives or at another. Further, as we have tried to indicate already here by focusing on the rare data available about families, and especially domestic relations between husbands and wives, as well as parents and children, defining features of Jewishness, no matter how vaguely or imprecisely conceived in the existential moment, cannot focus entirely on the performance of mitzvoth, the celebration of liturgical feasts and fasts, and the recognition of established rabbinical laws and customs. Religion must be described as more and other than these institutionalized practices to include emotional states, memories, and propensities, with women’s role ratcheted above that of men’s when the institutions of rabbinical authority and instruction are destroyed and forgotten, and children’s naive games and prayers isolated from previous educational norms and hence constituting a kind of preserved residue for adult meditation and speculation. With formal Judaism often fragmented, distorted, and hidden from the outside world, for many generations, even in the family attempting to sustain some modicum of secret faith whatever is learned and practiced occurs inside an overwhelming matrix of Christian beliefs and rituals. As Wachtel points out, for instance, “the experience of fasting” — one of the easiest customs to continue because, unlike feasts which are collective, loud and highly visible occasions, the fast can be solitary, silent, and inconspicuous — “could include a certain sensual, exaltation. Indeed,” he goes on, ‘fasting together was considered as a mark of trust or affection, the secret was shared with the family, friends, or even more significantly, with lovers” (p. 160). Fasting, known as cro and suchil, could become the very term for “love-making,” and hence take on new significations virtually never dreamt of before in Judaism, and yet thus become a potent new ritual for mystical, as well as social and psychological, elaboration. We have only touched on a few of the rich suggestions concerning children and the emotional life of Marranos and Crypto-Jews in Wachtel’s essay, and we hope other scholars will be able to return to the sources from which he draws his evidence, in order to mine the veins of gold and silver. The “facts” do not spring up out of the text; they must be recognized by vague hints and oblique allusions, and then interpreted with a mixture of historical caution and profoundly respectful wit — since the whole burden of Marrano life was to masquerade in one shape while knowing or suspecting another deep within oneself and one’s family, at the very least aware of a discomfort within the norms of the society to which one gives formal adherence.45

45

Many of these issues and especially questions of theory and methodology of research are discussed further in Norman Simms, “Marranism Reconsidered as Duplicity, Creativity, and Lost Innocence,” RuBriCa 13 (2004) 67–117.

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INCOMPLETE MOURNING AND UNRESOLVED GRIEF: MARRANOS AND CRYPTO-JEWS IN EXILE ON THE MORADAS Then, turning to my father and me, “What, more conversos?” he said jokingly, greeting us with his broad smile well-before Signor Ugo introduced us. “Conversos of my stamp, if you understand,” he added. “I understand, I understand,” said Father Papanstasiou. “Communion on Sundays, but Fridays the Shema. In other words, an alborayco, a halfbreed. A pezenk,” said the Greek priest. “Precisely!” snickered Signor Ugo. “With you Jews nothing is ever clear,” the Greek continued . . . Poor Jews, you’re citizens nowhere and traitors everywhere, even to yourselves.”46

In this encounter between young André Aciman, his father, and their friend Signior Ughetto who have come to the Greek Orthodox priest Father Papanstasiou, the understanding cleric. He has promised to baptize the family into the Christian faith as a formality to avoid persecution at school during the increasing dangers of Egyptian nationalism in the years following the Suez Crisis. As the boy listens, the three older men banter about terms to describe the nature of the conversion and the way in which Sephardic Jews have learned to negotiate the torturous route into the ambiguous territory of the condition of marranismo, of being an ambiguous people. Segnior Ugo and his family have already gone through the motions of their conversion, so that the priest jocularly hails the newcomers as “more conversos,” using the Spanish-Ladino expression. The Italian and the Greek then confirm their agreement that the ceremony about to happen will be a perfunctory one, with no real change of inner identity involved; that is, he accepted that the neophytes will be at best Crypto-Jews. But Father Papanstasiou then uses two other words in his mocking description of the kind of people he is helping to create. One is a hispanisized Arabic word used in Iberia during the fifteenth and sixteenth century to describe such ambiguous Jews. “He explained,” recalls Aciman in his memoirs written long after the event, “that alborayco came from al-Burak, Mohammed’s steed, which was neither horse, nor mule, male nor female.”47 The second term the Greek Orthodox priest uses is pezevenk, a term used in the 46

47

André Aciman, Out of Egypt: A Memoir (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996 [1994]) pp. 264–265. Ibid, p. 265. For further discussion of this anti-Jewish slander, see Norman Simms, “A Preference for Horses: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Luis de Carvajal el Mozo’s Autobiography” in Psychohistory: A Psychohistorical Approach to History (Rome, 19 September 2005) online at http:www.geocities.com/psychohistory2001.

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earlier mock insults between Signior Ugo and the Greek: it is Turkish for gobetween, bawd, fancy man, pederast, and pervert. This pejorative designation for someone who stands and acts between the sexes indicates the highly charged nature of the insult, with additional social, political and psychological connotations. Probably, pezevenk derives from the Armenian word boz-avag, a whore master or pimp. According to one source,48 “The Greeks use it too as ‘pushti’” where it means more generally “something like lowlife, rat, cheat, a disloyal person, a traitor.” Even further, while the semantic zone in Turkish and feeder languages of popular usage associate the term with guardians in general and pimps in particular, there is also a line that leads back to a more physiological denotation: small sacks, such as the bladder and the scrotum, in the sense that these bodily organs contain, control and guide substances associated with excretory and sexual functions. Hence, the pejorative connotations attach themselves to the whore-masters, whores, clients and actions that are considered filthy, shocking and comical; and, because these terms ambiguate gender roles, the pezevenk stands for a person or an action which breaches ethics, propriety, and social honour. While Aciman has his characters throw around these several terms in an ironic way, there is an historical background to them — and to the concepts they stand for — that is hardly funny at all; and which, indeed, indicates a deep and long-lasting condition of being hated and persecuted by the society around oneself, including, it would seem, by one’s own lost community, by one’s relatives who are now divided against themselves, and by one’s own innermost being — a guilt and shame for what one has done, become, and been born into. In the event, André’s father does not follow through with the conversion of his son and the rest of the extended Aciman family, as he was at least tempted to contemplate. However, the fact that this meeting takes place with the priest, as though heeding Ugo’s advice and lead, shows that for the Sephardim in Egypt at this time in the late 1950s — who feel, as well, as the matriarchs keep reminding them all, that at least twice in every Jew’s life he must be prepared to lose everything — the option of marranismo always remains a possibility. Because of this, then, each individual and the family as a whole suffers from a profound and lasting sense of loss, sometimes masking it by a Spanish bravado, sometimes cynically indulging in antinomian and even self-destructive acts, sometimes lapsing into a sentimentality that denies the significance of the recollected and 48

A discussion on the denotations, connotations, derivations and slang extensions of this word occurs on the HyeForum Message Board between 29 August and 1 July 2006. While most of the discustants have no professional training in linguistics and often have only a rough mastery of English, their comments cannot be taken as authoritative, but they are indicative of the range of meanings associated with the terms in question, and hence are relevant to the kinds of playful insults to be found in Aciman’s Out of Egypt and probably underlying the history of the words in regard to Crypto-Jewish experience.

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the anticipated losses. This grief extends back more than just through the one hundred years of living memory, from the escape from pogroms in Istambul to the persecutions in Alexandria; it also keeps returning to the massacres, the forced conversions, and the expulsions from the Iberian peninsula. Another characteristic of the problem that creates such mental disordering in the individuals and families that suffer such long-term, multi-generational trauma is the fact that the general matrix of their condition is not that of the CryptoJew, the one who lives on the outside as a Christian and on the inside, where his own or his family’s real identity has been transferred, as a Jew inasmuch as that is possible, both by external pressures limiting the performance of rabbinical and biblical laws and by internal knowledge and commitment governed by the force of tradition that still exists and by the degree of understanding possible in these troubling and confusing times; but rather that of the Marrano, the one who is not able to sustain a distinct and continuing doubleness of identity. Estelle Irizarry introduces another important term in El arte de la tergiversación,49 her account of nine short stories and a novella of Luis López Nieves, a Puerto Rican whose writings manifest this way of wandering between a history and a counter-history. By tergiversation she means to be lost in a state of ambiguity or topsyturveydom, spinning about dizzily, and twisting or turning from one identity to another. English dictionaries stress, from the Latin roots of the word — tergum (the back) + versari (to spin or turn) — the negative qualities of desertion of a cause, apostasy, evasion and subterfuge; while Spanish dictionaries stress the sense of distortion and twisting, particularly in regard to manipulating the interpretation of texts in order to falsify the sense. It is thus related to “equivocation” insofar as this term, introduced in England during the late sixteenth century to describe the behaviour of Jesuits and other Catholics trying to insinuate themselves into Protestant England and avoiding punishment for their treasonous and heretical beliefs and behaviour. In Iberia, tergiversación enters common usage at about the same time, thanks to a period of persecution, mass conversion and expulsion of the “other”, in order to deal with an analogous situation wherein former Jews and Muslims were forced to hide their inner feelings and thoughts or find their private selves painfully confused. Portuguese dictionaries, for their part, stress the evasion and prevarication inherent in the word and the French add to the range of meanings the sense of temporizing, delaying any statement of commitment or decision-making. In brief, then, tergiveración as a description of the Marrano condition has more than pejorative and negative values to it. The word carries the burden of a painful, guilt-ridden, humiliating experience of not knowing how to place oneself in the social, religious and intellectual worlds of one’s existential Sitzimleben. The Marrano is not so much a Crypto-Jew strategically or cynically 49

Estelle Irizarry, El arte de la tergiveración en Luis López Nieves: nuevos cuentos y novella (San Juan, PR: Terranova, 2006).

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manipulating appearances to protect himself or his family or to take advantage of his own and the society’s ambiguities about how to deal with someone who is nominally and apparently a member of the Christian community, but someone twisted, distorted, and perverted by this condition — and hurt and riddled with guilt and misgivings about it. For as much as he or she feels shamed by apostasy of ancestors who were once Jews and thus passed on to each subsequent generation the impure blood of the original condition, he or she also suffers profoundly from the inability to escape from the Lands of Idolatry and rejoin the rabbinical communities in more tolerant nations of Europe or in the welcoming cities of the Ottoman Empire around the Mediterranean and the Levant where functioning Jewish institutions exist and often flourish. Aciman’s depiction of his parents and relatives in Alexandria as a collection of eccentrics and grotesques, each of whom can be categorized by a distinct kind of bizarre way of behaving and often debilitating neurosis — and sometimes psychosis — needs to be seen as typical of the condition, and not merely an exaggerated, distorted and satirically theatrical presentation. That being so — and that which this chapter sets out to examine more closely — it is important to match the generic analysis of these grieving and anxious individuals and groups in their enactment of the roles which history has inscribed for them with the identification of those painful symptoms that mark their clinical illnesses.

THE CLINICAL PROBLEM The level of Olam Haba [the world to come] is commensurate with how much and how deeply one has acquired correct opinions. Therefore a Jew that has acquired correct opinions even if only by acceptance rather than full understanding already has a certain insight that is Olam Haba — a perfected Nefesh. The word Nefesh is traditionally translated as soul or spirit. It is not exactly correct. Rambam in his Eight Chapters describes it as what we call the total array of functions a human mind performs . . . its ability to abstract, conceptualize and act beyond survival only.50

The cure and treatment of the painful and extended effects of acute grief is one of the important concerns of modern psychiatry. Whether or not a person can 50

Anonymous. “Can There be a Halachic Consensus on Hashkafah? Part 3. Conclusion. Does Menashe get Olam Haba?” Believing is Knowing (25 July 2007) http://yediah.

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pass through all the stages of mourning can often indicate his or her ability to continue their lives in health or fall into states of clinical depression or manifest other signs of mental illness. Normal clinical research examines individuals in contemporary circumstances and follows through only in relatively short-term situations. As a modality of pain, grief can manifest itself in physical, as well as psychological and social forms. When pain or disease seems to have as much (or more) of a symbolic etiology as an identifiable lesion or biological cause, we can speak in terms of introjection of aggression towards the inside of the affected person rather (fully) than towards the deceased or defusing of a rage towards the self occasioned by shame or guilt that might lead towards greater violence (self-mutilation or suicide). When grief presents in strange behaviors, either in anti-social terms or in intensified or even obsessive acts of kindness or public service, we can begin to speak in terms of social disorders, not just of individual deficits. In a somewhat more subtle form, the affected person who can perform ordinary acts in such an unexpected way evokes strange responses from his or her immediate environment. Then the nature of the grief is further masked by feelings and activities associated with this alternative challenge or threat. What can be seen or experienced by both the family and friends or by objective observers is then, not the grief itself, which may be overlooked entirely, but the discrepancy between former normality and what is now abnormal, even though the actions or words in themselves may have no signs of dysfunction within a social scheme of acceptability. The individual thus successfully suppresses or masks the pain both from his or her own consciousness and the awareness of those around him or her. Two other factors make diagnosis more difficult. One deals with the phenomenon of collective grief, when groups of people suffer as a group the loss of large numbers of their own in acts of persecution, loss of their homeland through exile and expulsion, including loss of their mother tongue and familiar contours of culture, and thus loss of the social markers of their individual identities. Though these are phenomena we have grown all too familiar with in the last hundred years, and though there are now many studies of affected groups by different medical and caring institutions, the long term effects require more time than most researchers can afford to give — or, as I shall now suggest, than has as yet transpired. Thus the second difficulty occurs when the long term effects of the pains associated with grief in particular peoples transcends many generations, that is, when the events become historical rather than sociological, and when the psychological problems move from direct responses, however encoded into coping mechanisms, to those which are indirect in both action and verbal form: in other words, when they become blogspot.com/?widgetType=BlogArchive&widgetId=BlogArchive1&action=toggle&dir =open&toggle=MONTHLY-1201842000000&toggleopen=MONTHLY-1209614400000

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the subject of historiographical analysis and interpretation of what for want of a better word we will call myth. There have certainly been studies in recent times of these intergenerational effects of such collective events when individual procedures of mourning are overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the events, such as in natural disasters or wartime destructions or the Nazi Holocaust. There are cases in which modern research has been able to deal with small-scale disasters, such as forest fires, tornados, and floods, in which large numbers of people who are closely related find themselves collectively suffering losses at one and the same time of death of family and friends, destruction of property and means of livelihood, and apparent extinction of hope. However, there are two additional points that have come into focus (albeit obliquely at times) in this book. In one, we have indicated that psychiatrists and social scientists normally do not have the scope or the skills to deal with historical events that continue to ramify their psychical effects over more than two or three contiguous generations, and usually only when these generations are alive at the same time, as with a three-generation family that may be seen to interact within a relatively restricted time and place continuum. It will be useful to find a methodology for describing and analyzing such situations in the past because it is likely that future therapists will have to cope with the long-term consequences of the current trauma caused by population shifts, extinction of national identities, and transformations of environment with consequent traditional knowledge associated with geography, weather, and other specific conditions. Only by learning to see what happened in the past, over periods of many generations and perhaps over centuries, can we begin to plan to deal with those disasters, natural and human, we see unfolding before our eyes now — or those events of one and two generations ago whose consequences are only fully beginning to be felt today. The second point is that in Jewish, and other non-modern, secular modalities of thought, psychiatric matters fall into the category of ethical discussion (or moral philosophy), with therapy a factor in teaching, learning and understanding. In other words, when we deal with mentalities — and this means dealing with groups of people rather than individuals and with a plurality of opinions and personal decisions, conscious and unconscious — we cannot depend on clinical research because such investigations isolate individuals, treat them as biological units separate from social and historical dynamics, and attempt to negate or at least down play cultural distinctions.

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NEW SYNTHETIC APPROACH NEEDED The Sephardic Diaspora into this corner of the world carried with it a piece of a complex history, part of the complex history of the Jewish people in its infinitely varied border presence and passage.51

That means that medical professionals and social scientists will need to learn to work with and to master the skills of historiography in order to assess the processes of historical development and to interpret correctly historical documents and artefacts. The following questions will be pertinent: What about situations in which the period of time stretches beyond the limits of several lifetimes, and when the boundaries individual mourning experiences are breached as well by exile or expulsion and new generations lose touch with the specific memories of the original event in space as well as time? In other words, we need to find a way to track the effects of trauma beyond the limits of clinical procedures. (1) Can historians in their turn learn to adjust the methods and theories of the clinicians and therapists — particularly, insights into the way in which incomplete mourning and the internalization of such unresolved grief passes on from one person to another — in cases where the consequences go on for hundreds of years? Such grief and internalized painful experiences over such long periods are no longer attached to the articulate personal memories in a chain of tradition. Psychohistory suggests already some ways of approaching this problem. Non-verbal memories can persist unconsciously as somatic distortions of personality structure, both within individuals, as experienced in their earliest pre-verbal memories created by child-rearing practices that inflict violent, abusive and humiliating pains on infants, and within groups, such as extended families and communities, as evidenced by anomalous behaviors that stand out in contextual and analogous groups and by processes of delegation of particular symptomformations to particular individuals within the affected community, so that this sub-group of delegated victims comes to characterize the particular fears and anxieties of the larger group itself. (2) Further, again according to current psychohistorical assumptions, beyond these patterns of dysfunction that mark the group suffering several generations beyond any recollected moment of collective crisis, the individuals and collective may also organize itself in such a way that the 51

Ori Z. Soltes, “Introduction: Art, History, Memory, Identity, Truth: The Art and Craft of Cary Herz” in Herz, New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews, p. 5. This statement reminds us that one of the anti-Semitic charges in Central Europe was that Jews were boundary crossers or transgressors. To talk about a marginalized people in the fringes then is of the essence.

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internalized “social alters” — usually thought to be characteristic only of individuals who suffer dissociative personalities because of PTSD — appear enacted in both strange rites and celebrations of the group and in what we may call aesthetic forms adopted by the group as indicative of its difference from surrounding groups and cultures. What this means is that what is needed is more than just normative historiographical techniques to assess the evidence of the past, something relatively easy to achieve in association with modern psychiatric and psychological methods. There also needs to be a way of reading obliquely, symptomatically, and psychoanalytically the texts, art works, and physical objects produced (or destroyed) at various removes from the traumatic occasion. Rhetorical and other literary skills have to be reshaped so as to do more than — although never less than, however — tracing patterns of influence, reception, and recreation of commonplace ideas, images, genres, and other “artistic” or “eccentric” features of the aesthetic pattern development. The new psychohistorical approach will need to map out normative patterns of development in the larger cultural zones — sometimes including both the society from which the traumatized group is ejected and the new host culture into which they enter with more or less openness by this host community (or communities) — so to measure carefully the points of interference and transgression, the degrees of time-lag and falseconsciousness in the attempts to maintain prior traditions, to accommodate the losses and gains, to deny or overcome experienced disruptions and painful incongruities, and the origin of rationalizations and back-formations.

COMPONENTS OF THE NEW APPROACH In short, throughout its history, Judaism has fastened to the principle that all forms of authority must be grounded in the law. The undesirability of assimilating with other political, religious, or legal systems is a corollary of having rejected the notion that authority is the effect of power, that is, “violence.” — José Faur52

Unfortunately, much of what we would want to know about these long-term historical situations has not been explicitly recorded by persons living through 52

José Faur, “Law and Hermeneutics in Rabbinic Jurisprudence: A Maimonidean Perspective” Cardozo Law Review 14 (May 1993) online LexisNexis TM Academic online at http:// faur.derushah.com/downloads/essays/Law%20and%20Herm . . . onidean%20Perspective

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those times or their immediate heirs. This is not just because they were themselves for the most part unaware of the psychical experiences occurring after the traumatic incident itself, but because until very recently public records were not adapted to the level of intimate experiences involved. In addition, as we have attempted to show in this book, what was historical — not merely what was experienced as irreversible developments through time and occurring in specific geographical space — cannot be discussed properly without taking into consideration the imaginative, the oneiric, and the midrashic; that is, we need to understand them as literary or poetic constructs, conceits in the sense that these tropes were thought of in the period of the Baroque; dreams in the sense that was understood then and earlier as collective visions or revelatory events by a few on behalf of the whole cultural group; and aggadot that do more than tell stories that provide connections, contexts and significance, but also transform, transgress and transcend what is normally taken today as history. Where attempts were made to record the traumatic events, these events were made in terms most amenable to providing heroic, mythic, or ameliorative versions, accommodating the present crisis to long-term traditions of salvation or anticipations of apocalyptic reversal. As often happens after incidents of sexual or other abuse, attempt is made to empower the victim by claiming special attention by demonic or heavenly beings, partly through identification with the all-powerful abuser and partly through split-off creation of alternate beings who absorb the pain, the humiliation, and the helplessness, or who can fight back in fantastic scenarios, or who can be attacked in turn as a way of regaining lost control. In other instances, techniques of diminishing the existential crisis are developed, whether through self-abasement comedy or recreating memorials that provide absent acts of heroic defense against the enemy. The surviving documents of the historical period of suffering by authors in the dominant surrounding cultures are also inadequate evidence of positive facts concerning the traumatized group because other persons were not able to perceive the particulars of the sequence of events since their function as archivists was to celebrate the norms of the society, not its eccentricities, and to focus on dominant, influential groups, not those who were dysfunctional and eccentric. Those responsible for the victimization may seek to mitigate their responsibility or the extent of the trauma, or to project back into the event itself instances of compassion and help not originally there. Created episodes or unbalanced emphases on real instances of criminality or provocation by the victims may form a part of the official record. Mythic and legendary features may also be built into these formal documents to shift the blame to fate, divine punishment, or some secret pattern of necessary state policy. Nevertheless, the modern scholar, alerted to symptomologies by contemporary clinical and field studies of analogous persons and circumstances may be sensitised to the sorts of inadvertent, oblique, and deliberately suppressed data 433

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that leaves traces of its presence, and hence return to the known documents, as well as seeking patterns of behavior and belief in long-term sequences of verbal and non-verbal records of the past that were neither intended or realized by the producers of these historical materials. Because neither the victims nor the victimizer can be aware of the deeply intimate consequences of their actions nor of the long term effects on themselves, the remaining documents, art works, architecture, and other physical remains have to be analyzed in ways beyond both clinical procedure (which seeks to describe a current situation and provide treatment to heal or ameliorate present conditions) and conventional historiography (which looks for the ongoing and contingent features of sequences of events), as well as of established conventions of literary and artistic analysis (which seek to fix the unique and internally coherent identity of texts and objects). The new method is more concerned with breaks, fissures, denials, and other matters of discontinuity and incoherence. In the end, of course, nothing certain can be adduced about the historical evidence and therefore we can only make relatively educated guesses. However, the point of such study is not just to try to understand the past in itself. It is also to extrapolate from those historical circumstances clues towards a better understanding, with some predicative quality, of current collective trauma, so as to be alert ourselves to the signs of what may transpire in generations to come and therefore to prepare treatments that to some degree can alleviate, if not terminate, the cycle of continuous reinforcement of suffering among individuals and groups.

THE MIDRASHING MACHINE Aquella sórdida trama subterránea fue denominada la “Complicidad Grande” y la Corona hispana tenía la seguridad de que una maquinación siniestra era urdida de uno al otro extremo del Nuevo Mundo. — Alberto Osorio Osorio53

Earlier in this book we presented the notion that the Inquisition was a huge contraption set up to persecute the middle classes of the Iberian realms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that in response those most at risk — the New Christians in Spain, Portugal, and the territories in Europe and 53

Alberto Osorio Osorio, “Sinonimia luso-judaica” Magen-Escudo No. 145 (octubrediciembre 2007) 17. “This nasty secret contraption was called ‘The Great Conspiracy’ and the Spanish Crown feared their security was threatened by a sinister plot hatched from one end to the other of the New World.”

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overseas ruled by these Catholic Monarchies — invented their own countercontraption to protect themselves and advance their own commercial, social and commercial interests throughout the world. While the Holy Office had its own network of underground cells, agents, and informers, the PortugueseSpanish Nation — that is, the practicing Jews who escaped from the Lands of Idolatry, the Crypto-Jews who attempted to lead double lives, and the Marranos who played more cynical, sceptical and confused games — had a mirror-image world of subversive and covert institutions, activities, and beliefs. In the next and last chapter of the book, I am going to argue that the counter-contraption is a midrashing machine, and that its purpose is to transgress the regulations of the Inquisitorial apparatus through inversions, diversions, contrafactions and delusions. In a long, detailed analysis of the Christian Midrash which is the story of the Passion told in the New Testament, Maurice Mergui reaches a startling conclusion: “ . . . the real good news which concerns Jews and Christians: the refusal of the Jews is a midrashic formation.”54 Mergui then argues that this necessary impasse cannot be broken. Why? Because if Jews recognized Jesus as the Messiah and thus ceased to be Jews there would be no Gospel and no Christianity. Still more: this breaking out of the huis clos can be inverted as well: if Judaism not only rejected the death and resurrection of Jesus but also refused to take seriously the midrashic processes by which that narrative is constructed, then Jews would be denying their own fundamental textual means of understanding and acting in the world. But this is a conundrum that only makes sense in a Christian context. It is a non-argument in rabbinical circles because the logic is all wrong. It is more problematical in terms of the Marranos on the Moradas because they seek to break the vicious circle by collapsing the distinction between Jew and Christian — and they do this by bringing in the third party, always already there in the carnival midrash which is the Passion, the carnival that Mergui describes as a double, but which I want to expand to a triple negatation, a saturnalian turning of the world upside down, inside out, and back to front: (1) Christians become the New Israel and thus their midrash fulfils all prophecies in the Old Testament, perfects all incomplete, fragmentary and inchoate prefigurations (figurae) of messianic birth pangs and the triumph of life over death; (2) the hidden dimensions of prophetic words, satiric harangues and poetic lyrics are made literal in the birth, career and execution of Jesus, as well as made explicit and real in his family, and his disciples, while actual historical persons, places and events are distorted, displaced or replaced altogether; 54

Maurice Mergui, “Genèse de la Passion”, extracted from his Comprendre les origines du Christianisme on Champ du Midrash.

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and finally (3) the Jews are made pagan, the pagans become Christian, and the Christians live as New Israel. In the case of the Penitentes, New and Old Christians become the original Christians who are still Jews, separate themselves from the ecclesia and the body politic of the Catholic Monarchy and live in the desert (bamidbar) waiting, enduring and enacting (embodying) the giving of the Law by substituting acts of violence for rational understanding of the Torah. What does this all mean in practice, that is, in the history of the Marranos on the Moradas? Here is a short passage from a psalm in Isaiah 26: 20–21 to 27:1 that may help focus on the problem that we have tried to articulate in this book. The gloss I put alongside may be taken as a key to open the door into the midrash Go into your rooms, my people,

The people of Holy Israel must hide themselves in the time of crisis. Shut your doors behind you. They must pretend to be other than they are. Hide yourselves a little while In the act of dissimulation they create the conditions in which the messianic times can begin, the Lord respond to their call. Until the wrath has passed. The Day of Atonement will return. For, see, Yahweh will soon come out The Messiah is hiding in his morada. of his dwelling The days of persecution are the days of to punish all the inhabitants of earth sanctification. for their crimes. The idolaters and their agents will fall. The earth will reveal its blood and Flagellation and crucifixion are necessary acts of no longer hide its stain. penitence To cleanse la mancha of impure blood. That day, Yahweh will punish, The great monster of the Inquisition will be killed, with his sword, massive and strong, justice and mercy will return to the earth, Leviathan the fleeing serpent, the contraption will fall apart, Leviathan the twisting serpent: the apparatus of evil will fail, he will kill the sea-dragon Messiah will rule.

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MEDITATIONS AND SPECULATIONS For when the world in which the Jews lived was destroyed and everything around them crumbled in the tumult and shock of disaster, there emerged upon the ruins a substitute world, ghostly and fantastic, to be sure, but luminous and angelic and pregnant with hope . . . — Benzion Netanyahu1 Through exegesis, Judaism was able to grow and develop in the most adverse circumstance, without having to lose its connection with Scripture. Intimately connected with exegesis are the denim mufla’im (undefined laws or casus omissus). There is purposeful ambiguity in the Law designed to allow for adaptability and development . . . to accommodate the law to the new developments and circumstances. — José Faur2

It is very hard to put aside this book without suggesting a series of meditations and speculations that run from the several arguments wound together in the first seven chapters. Though it may look like we are running away from our central concerns, it should be evident to the careful reader that we are always concerned with the Catholic brothers in the Penitentes and with the Marranos 1

2

Benzion Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman & Philosopher, 5th ed. revised and updated (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1998; 1953) p. 91. José Faur, “Law and Hermeneutics in Rabbinic Jurisprudence: A Maimonidean Perspective” Cardozo Law Review 14 (May 1993) online LexisNexis TM Academic online at http://faur.derushah.com/downloads/essays/Law%20and%20Herm . . . onidean%20 Perspective.

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on the Moradas. Thus in this last short concluding chapter, I want to try to explain how and why these people were able, whether they consciously knew it or not, to work their way back from their own times and customs to the earliest cultural and textual layers of the foundational documents both of Talmudic Judaism and primitive Christianity and for them to discover, again whether they were aware of it or not, points of contact3 between their separate historical and spiritual backgrounds. These are threads of discourse that, on the one hand, lead back from the 1590s through the traumatic events of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the radical fissures that fragmented Iberian Jewry in the three previous centuries, and then even further back into the various possibilities of Jewishness that contextualized the crises of the two centuries before through the two centuries after the foundation of both Judaism and Christianity. On the other hand, these same arguments not only slither forward to the experiences of the Penitentes and the Marranos as they enter our own contemporary world in terms of events in Old and New Mexico, but also significantly through the great horrors and triumphs that mark Jewish history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — on the negative side, the pogroms in Eastern Europe, the Blood Libels and other slanders of Alfred Dreyfus, Mendel Beilis and similar unbelievable distortions of the truth, and the Holocaust; but also on the positive side, the growth of American Jewry, the founding of Israel and the renaissance of the Jewish arts and sciences throughout the twentieth century. Since we are not concerned here with either the events or the grounding of our own contemporary problems, we turn back to the theoretical issues, and therefore with questions about what kind of textualization4 goes on among the Penitentes, what evidence there is that the Marranos played a key if subordinate role in their development, and what kind of a book it is possible to write about them. Will it be a study similar to those undertaken by the concerned Christians in the Champ du Midrash group in France or something more Jewish, as in Jacob Neusner’s project to see each text or suite of texts as springing up out of a particular socio-political milieu, a kind of microhistory of the founding of rabbinical Judaism, or that of José Faur who argues for the rational integrity and moral-judicial significance of these documents in the long run and especially in Sephardic tradition? 3

4

Norman Simms, Points of Contact: A Study of the Interplay and Intersection of Traditional and Non-Traditional Literatures, Cultures, and Mentalities. New York: Pace University Press, 1990. Norman Simms, The Humming Tree: History of Mentalities. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Textualization is a dynamic process of negotiating the tensions between the spoken and the unspeakable, the imaginable and the unimaginable, and conceptualizable and inconceivable. The history of mentalities is then the study of these changes, developments, ruptures and recreations.

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The problem with the project undertaken by Le Champ du Midrash and its associates is that in their zeal to overturn the false assumption that all New Testament documents were originally written in a Greek koine and to insist that they were composed necessarily in Hebrew because only in that ancient language of Jewish traditional exegesis could the structures of midrash be built up, they also overstate the case. These scholars claim that the rabbis and other Jews in Roman occupied Palestine were virtually ignorant of Greek and of Greek culture. Now while it may be that the earliest groups to call themselves Christian and to centre their liturgical worship around a eucharistic paschal or Passover meal redefined as a messianic banquet were drawn from nonscribal and non-Pharasaic organizations, and hence were ignoramuses so far as Hellenistic literature was concerned, the same cannot be said for the educated classes of Jews whether in the Land of Israel itself or in its Diaspora around the Mediterranean. The evidence is too compelling.5 Talmudic, midrashic and other rabbinical discourses reveal not only occasional Greek loan words, variously assimilated into written Hebrew or Aramaic script, but much more: a participation in Hellenistic civilization.6 Rabbis took part in academic debates for and against various schools of classical philosophy. The sages used a wide range of literary, rhetorical, and juridical tropes and techniques. This familiarity with Greek knowledge in Jewish circles — and it also appears in many, though not all, later Patristical writings — indicates that the translators of the Gospels, Epistles, and apocalyptic texts that formed the essential pool out of which a Christian canon was eventually constituted were either very different in kind from the men who turned the midrashic commentaries about messianic events into narratives and personal testimonies of a pseudo-historical type or, if they were not distinct at all, then they worked to a very different agenda. It is also 5

6

According to Carlo Ginzberg’s now classic statement, “In ancient Greece, the historian’s autopsia, or direct visual experience of an event, was conveyed by stylistic ‘vividness’ [in other words, evidentia is enargeia]. This is a far cry from what we are used to call[ing] ‘evidence’, which is invariably based on an act of inference. Historians (like judges or policemen) make more or less reasonable inferences about events they did not witness, relying upon evidence as diverse as newspaper articles, fragments of pottery or cigarette butts. But notwithstanding the obvious differences, a certain continuity between our present and antiquity is undeniable, since both our notion of evidence and the Latin evidentia emerged in the sphere of rhetoric, especially judicial” (“Learning from the Enemy: On the French Prehistory of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, UCLA European Colloquium 16 February 2006). José Faur shows that Hellenstic Judaism through writers such as Philo Judeus and Flavius Josephus were far more important in maintaining continuity between Gaonic and Maimonidean Judaism and classical civilization than is usually granted to this branch of pre- and extra-rabbinical Judaism (see “Law and Hermeneutics in Rabbinic Jurisprudence: A Maimonidean Perspective” Cardozo Law Review (May 1993) pp. 1657ff.) Participation, however, does not mean assimilation or agreement; it means critical awareness and strategic engagement.

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now clear that a series of editorial efforts were made by different ecclesiastical councils under imperial control to smooth out and create a fairly consistent Christian Bible, just as there were continuing debates among the teachers and sages in Yavneh and other yeshivot to collect, redact, and promulgate the great books of rabbinical Judaism on behalf of the Nation in Exile. All of which is not to say that there might have existed a kind of conviviencia between Jews, Christians and pagan philosophers in the early or late Roman Empire similar to that supposedly evident in Golden Age Iberia. Indeed, it might be possible to say that there was outright antagonism on both sides, with Jews taking opportunities to strike out against Christians, just as they did against Roman pagans.7 For this reason, when we begin to see that midrashing was not just an exercise in writing or thinking or imagining the past, present and future in novel and twisted ways, then we can start to set the record straight without depending on pseudo-history or sentimental myths. 1. Given that Hellenistic civilization was dominant in the Mediterranean, neither Jews nor later Christians could avoid coming into contact with it and, having made such contact, would be attracted by its better aspects of art, philosophy, science and legal institutions. Insofar as Israel dealt with its dispersed co-religionists within the language and culture of classicism, Jews learned to accommodate themselves to the surrounding culture and absorbed and adapted the ideas and customs that seemed compatible with their own historical values, beliefs, and practices. They did this both by violently interfering with texts and by strong, assertive acts of tergiversation in history.8 2. These attractions and the often seductive powers the Hellenistic ideas and institutions had on a certain section of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel, especially in a large metropolitan city like Jerusalem, and in the Diaspora, roused concerns among rabbinical authorities who saw — and foresaw — detrimental effects on the future of Jewish education and religious life. As always for Holy Israel in a non-Jewish world, the tensions between the Law of Moses and the law of the Roman Empire could not reach full agreement, and the normative ways of am yisroel were unable 7

8

Elliott Horowitz, “’The Vengeance of the Jews was Stronger than their Avarice’: Modern Historians and the Persian Conquest of Jerusalem in 614” Jewish Social Studies 4:2 (winter 1998) online at http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=96507514. Horowitz writes: “Yet a re-examination of the record of Jewish religious violence against Christians and the external manifestations of their religion during the millennium after the Christianization of the Roman empire under Constantine . . . would reveal patterns of behavior very much at variance with the alleged historic self-image of the Jews ‘as a people abhorring violence in any form.’” Milton Ash, El Horror: Jesús de Nazaret. “15. La fábula de Jesús el judío. La creación de un hibrido y del judeotergiversación-pagano-cristianismo” online at http://www.elhorror. net.

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3.

4.

5.

6.

9

10

to adjust to the customs and opinions of young Jewish men and women growing up within the framework of Hellenistic society. This in itself caused antagonisms between assimilationists and anti-assimilationists.9 The growing independence of Christians and their desire to bring into their fold increasing numbers of Greeks and Romans who were born pagans meant that this ambiguously Judeo-Christian culture in itself challenged rabbis to not only define themselves as different from the features most defining of the confessional and doctrinal characteristics, but to further back off from those aspects of classical civilization which would either give the impression of sliding towards Christian ideals and worship or open up paths down which young and impressionable Jews would be led astray.10 As we have suggested already, Christians for their part also needed to define themselves as other than Jews, particularly in the sense that Judaism was recreating itself as a rabbinical and Talmudic religion, while at the same time asserting their own triumphalism as the fulfillment, replacement, and transcendence of Israel and its Old Dispensation. Though initially opposed to Rome and Hellenistic society because they were pagan, Christianity shifted its grounds and sought to recreate the Empire as a Christian institution and give to its Roman past a similar figurative function as it did to Old Testament history, prophecy and spiritual legislation. At the end of the fourth century, with the nominal conversion of Constantine, these goals entered a new phase of rapid fulfillment, the imperial cult providing a new model for Christian self-rule and organization, and the power of the Christian Emperor marshaled to impose a series of church councils that almost rubbed away all rival versions of the new faith (Arianism, Manicheanism, etc.) and imposed a new centralized, military-style, worldly ethic on worship and pastoral care. On the side of the Greeks and Romans, it must be kept in mind, from the earliest times of the Hellenic historians and anthropologists and then under the Republic, there was often both a fascination with Jewish and Henry A. Fischel, Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy : A Study of Epicurea and Rhetorica in Early Midrashic Writings (Leiden : E.J. Brill, 1973). “The later Palestinian Tannaim and early Amoraim, between 150 and 250, must have been exposed to some of these media, since talmudic literature shows parallels to several popular items of both Epicureanism and anti-Epicureanism in this period. A fresh investigation into this phenomenon recently undertaken by the present writer suggested that certain novel themes and values in mishnaic-talmudic culture seemed to be of Epicurean origin in both content and formulation” (p. 4). Fischel also remarks, this time concerning Ben Zoma, one of the four who entered PaRDeS in a midrash told in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Haggah 14b: “Ultimately, the opposition to his activities and the anecdotal portrayals which show him in an unflattering light may have been based on closeness to the Greco-Roman culture in general” (Fischel, Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy p. 9).

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7.

8.

9.

later Christian culture and morals, the Hebrew traditions representing at once an exotic otherness that attracted classical thinkers because of its historical depth and profound sense of moral dignity offered to all peoples, and at the same time a disgust and horror at what it seemed to represent as dangerous and insulting to classical values of ethical, moral and aesthetic sensibilities. As the dominant and often aggressive hegemonic power, Hellenistic Rome as an imperium found Jewish nationalism and religious particularism unacceptable, and fought long and hard against any signs of Israel’s assertion of its national rights. José Faur has especially argued that Rome’s objections to Judaism were neither religious nor ethnic, but political. We would add to this political dimension other qualities of aesthetics and morality. Christian Rome was especially hostile to Jews and Judaism. Augustine’s compromise, as it were, allowed to Judaism a degree of toleration on two grounds: (a) that they remain as a living witness to the validity of the prefigurative Old Dispensation recorded in the Hebrew Bible11 and (b) that they exist as a miserable, defeated nation until such time as they convert and signal the Second Coming of Christ and the commencement of the messianic era. Roman officials and political theoreticians in defense of the Christianized empire felt challenged by Jewish ideas of legal obligations in the covenant with God and the way in which rabbinical courts and Jewish communal leaders articulated their insistence on constitutional rule and democratic procedures. Even more, Christian imperial policy opposed Judaism as a pernicious aberration whose existence posed a constant threat to the power and glory of the City of God, the Holy Empire of Rome.

Thus, despite these negative qualities and the nearly two millennia of oppression that Jews suffered within Christendom, it must also be noted that deep within the Church there were beliefs and practices that often protected Jews from abuse and insult, and this even before the emergence of Protestant churches and states a millennium and half later with ideals of toleration, secularism and pluralism. Despite the Inquisition and the Statutes of Blood Purity, Iberia itself occasionally — and perhaps more often than one expects — acted through its priests, princes and civil officials to defend Jews and allow the relatively peaceful and cooperative co-existence of Christians and Jews. For this reason, as we have hinted earlier in this book, many Sephardim elected to stay within the jurisdiction of Spanish or Portuguese civilization, finding the language, culture and institutions on the whole more amenable to their aesthetic and moral 11

These ideas have been given almost definitive form in the work of Eric Auerbach and Emile Mâle in the course of the first fifty years of the twentieth century.

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sensibilities than not, certainly, for these individuals and families, than the life of Dhimmitude amongst Muslim nations or the precarious and unpredictable dependence on expressions of tolerance in other Christian lands, Protestant and Catholic. If they were forced to leave or chose to migrate to Islamic lands or other parts of Christendom for commercial reasons, they nonetheless did not divorce their cultural, aesthetic and social ideals from Spain and Portugal.

MIDRASH OR MISHMOSH? Retenons donc, pour l’instant, que dans l’esprit de Philon, la haine des païens envers les Juifs et leur prince, s’exprime spontanément sous la forme de la dérision et du carnival. Notons que marin, sonne comme le grec môrainô, devinir fou (qui traduit ‘hébreu ski).12 R. Isaak b. Eleasar testified: his father told him, that R. Isaak Pomar’s (Fumar?) father was married to the niece of his wife. The niece was an Anusà and came from the family Benveniste. Furthermore he was a Kohen from the family Ardut. R. Isaak b. Eleasar and another man also mentioned that R. Josef Pomar, who lived in Constantinople, was regarded as a Kohen and a member of the family Ardut. He was overheard saying that the father of R. Isaak Pomar was his uncle, namely the brother of his father. She he (R. Isaak Pomar) to be regarded as a Kohen now be the first to recite the Torà and to say blessings? R. Moshe Trani decided that he is to be regarded as a Kohen. Responsa of Moshe Trani (d. 1585)13

Earlier in this book we discussed certain aspects of the Holy Office of the Inquisition that showed how it was able to organize a vast amount of information from diverse sources and over long periods of time to create what was, in effect, a psychological profile of those individuals and their families whom they suspected of being Judaizers and part of a complex, conspiratorial Jewish effort to infiltrate the heart of Spanish society and to undermine its Christian 12

13

Maurice Mergui, “Genèse de la Passion” Le Champ du Midrash No. 71. “Let us hold in mind for a moment that, in the spirit of Philo [Judeus], the hate of the pagans towards the Jews and their prince is expressed spontaneously in the form of derision and carnival. Note too that marine, ‘sailor’, sounds like the Greek môrainô, ‘to go crazy’ (which translated the Hebrew ski).” II.40 (p. 10b f.) Cited by David Ramirez in Key Legal Responsa of Iberian Anusim (14th to 20th c) p. 27.

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beliefs and institutions.14 This old-fashioned contraption (as we termed it) also honed a system of analysis, probing the minor acts, the inadvertent comments, and the non-verbal accompaniments of confessions, defensive arguments, and overheard conversations, as well as intercepted letters, confiscated journals, and other materials likely to yield hints of the suspected person’s inner thoughts and feelings. With remarkable sensitivity and insight, given the limitations and animus within it, the Inquisition created the grounds for a real psychological insight.15 The assumption was that judaizing was known both by genetic proclivity (the stain of polluted Jewish blood) and by inadvertent remarks and acts (inculcated by culture and family tradition), thus nature and nurture. To a certain degree, the construction of a counter-contraption by the victims of the Inquisition — or those anticipating such an eventuality — can also be regarded as a parody, just as such mocking reflections or refractions operate in midrashic writing and in the codes used by incarcerated Marranos to communicate to one another and to the ever-present but invisible audience of their real auto-da-fé.16 The Jewish medical regime moreover — allowed and protected during the most intense hatred against all else that was Jewish, even to the point of keeping Hebrew books associated with medicine, and hence the anecdotes, case studies and marginal notes of generations of Jewish physician families — began to understand disease in terms of the Inquisition’s own protocols: an alien body invading and attacking a host organism from within, a disease understood as a text to be interpreted through autopsia, that is, selfevidential witness by opening the body and imagining the infected or wounded internal corpus from the outside, treatment by both physical interventions to remove the foreign body or affected tissue and a talking cure that listened, recorded and analyzed confessions beyond surface intentions and techniques of deliberate denials, confusions and deferrals.17 That this whole approach, based on Christian principles and backed up by Hellenistic science,18 collides with the more midrashic style of Jewish medicine needs further discussion in another place. How the two differing views were reconciled is a very long story. 14

15

16

17 18

On this point, see Mila Maselli’s review of Carlo Ginzburg, Il filo e le trace. Vero, falso, finto (Rome: Feltrinelli, 2008) in Secretum: scienze saperi forme di cultura 25 (2008) online at http://www. secretum-online.it/default.php?idnodo=58&sez=9Norman Simms, “Jewish Philosophy Influenced Crypto-Jewish Practice of Medicine” Halapid 13:1 (2006) 1, 8–9. Fischel, Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy pp. 24–25. Also see Masera, “Literatura y canción popular” p. 178. González, “Ideas inquisitoriales sobre la literatura” p. 113. Wlad Godzich, “From the Inquisition to Descartes: The Origins of the Modern Subject” Surfaces 2:16 (1992) online at http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revue/surfaces/vol2/ godzich. Godzich’s discussion of the arguments for and against the imagination, that is, for and against the historical reality of delusions and diseases or heresies, deserves careful attention.

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When the officials of the Holy Office came upon particular men or women who had strong views of Judaism or were in the process of forming coherent, articulate arguments against the true faith (Catholicism), the officers of the Inquisition took the opportunity to engage in lengthy and repeated discussions, not just to try to argue away the erroneous beliefs they felt they were encountering and to convince their interlocutors of the better arguments the Church had, but to hear out these heretical statements, partly for the sake of recording them in order better to prepare their fellow clerics to pick up clues in other persons’ discourses but also partly to sharpen their own ability to counteract such apparently consistent treatises concerning a Judaism unheard of outside of these conditions.19 The friars, priests and lawyers were often fascinated by the speeches made to them, the notebooks kept by prisoners, the songs recollected or composed by the accused judaizers; and the inquisitors would allow the interrogations to go on for many years, even decades, rather than bringing the cases to a quick conclusion and relaxing or handing over the condemned to the secular authorities for execution in an auto-da-fe. They were fascinated, we should add, not in the sense that they were brought to doubt their own beliefs, though this seems to have happened on rare occasions, but usually because it was so unusual to hear anyone articulate a coherent belief-system both contrary to the Santa Fé and outside the heretical views of Protestants.20 Thus, we work now21 with the assumption that the Inquisitors were, in their own milieu and in their own eyes, men of good faith and with the best intentions towards the protection of the lands and peoples they were empowered to guard against heresy and demonic harm. In fact, when we look at the way in which they carefully read, reported on, and made suggestions for the censorship of books or the care of men and women who seemed to have fallen into sinful acts or were inadvertently slipping down that path to damnation, we can almost 19

20

21

In the words of Scarlett Freund and Teofilo F. Ruiz in “Jews, Conversos, and the Inquisition in Spain, 1391–1492: The Ambiguities of History”: “Clearly, the conversos did not constitute a socially united group. Their divergent religious attitudes resulted not only in clashes with Christian society but also in ‘intracommunal and intrafamilial’ disputes. The diversity of their religious practices was further underscored by an ambivalence towards their former brethren and an uncertainty as to their own identity. Often they did not know who they were, or where they belonged in society” (in Perry, Marvin, Schweitzer, Frederick M., eds., Jewish-Christian Encounters over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust. NY, Peter Lang, 1994) One can compare this to the Italian Inquisition in Friuli granting so much time to the miller Manocchio to expound on his theories, as studied by Ginzburg in The Worm and the Cheese. Alma Mejía González, “Ideas inquisitoriales sobre la literatura: el buen sentido, la ortodoxia y la recepción” in Mariana Masera, coord., La otra Nueva España: La palabra marginada en la Colonia (Madrid: Azul, 2001) pp. 109–116.

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come to admire their judicial and critical sensitivity and patience. As literary critics, we might also say, they were close-readers, aware of literary style and generic differences, attuned to rhetorical register and tone, decorum and propriety,22 as well as keenly alert to the possibilities of youthful, uneducated, and careless readers or listeners misinterpreting literary entertainments and performances that, though unexceptional in a technical sense in regard to their doctrinal content, could be misconstrued.23 At this point in our concluding argument, we cannot concern ourselves in a fruitless, revisionary exercise of comparing the numbers of victims of the Inquisition compared to analogous judicial systems in Protestant lands, whether organized by the monarch for political purposes or by the churches for their own ecclesiastical ends.24 Cruelty and evil cannot be compared statistically.25 What remains as undisputed about the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions is that over a very long period of time they created a climate of fear, coercion, and stagnation in the lands where their jurisdiction extended, and that as a consequence large numbers of people were made ill — physically and mentally — and large numbers of these terrorized victims died as a result, not necessarily a spectacular death at the stake or more privately in extended periods on the slave galleys or in exile in insalubrious climates: but because their lives were ruined, their wealth and titles taken from them, their families divided, their futures blighted by public humiliation and shame. Elsewhere in Europe and the New Worlds of America and Asia, outbursts of witch trials, religious persecution and political riots, even confessional wars stand apart in both quality and quantity from the five hundred years of continuous and oppressive mental censorship imposed by the Holy Office. It cannot be said, as some still try to do, that most people in 22

23 24

25

Margarita Peña, “Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón: Ortodoxia, superstición y Judaísmo” in Mariana Masera, coord., La otra Nueva España pp. 166–173. On the range of genres and registers the inquisitiorial censors were concerned with, see p. 171. González, “Ideas inquisitoriales sobre la literatura,” p. 115. According to Alberto R. Treiyer, citing R. Palma’s Anales de la Inquisición de Lima (Lima: Ediciones del Congreso de la República, 1897): “En efecto, ‘era muy frecuente que los reos muriesen en la prisión por conseguía de la tortura, melancolía y malos tratos, o que suicidasen. Inducidlos a este acto de depuración el que la Inquisición difería por largo tiempo la ejecución de la sentencias’” (La Inquisición de Lima y las corrientes libertadoras de América: sus condicionamientos político-religiosos actuales” online at http://www. tagnet.org/distinctivemessages/Spanish/Document . . . quisicionde Lima.doc. Marian Horvat, “The Holy Inquisition: Myth or Reality” originally published in Catholic Family News (March 1998) now available online at Ecclesia Militans: The Church Militant at http://www.geocities.com/Athena/Troy/6480/inquisition2. “Editor’s Note: Centuries of false propaganda have convinced most people, good Catholics included, that the Inquisition was one of the most evil institutions ever devised. Presented here is a longoverdue defence in which Dr. Marian Horvat, Professor of Medieval History, sets the record straight by completely debunking five of the most common myths about the Holy Inquisition.” A noble effort to defend the indefensible.

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Europe and in Spanish America simply got on with their lives and careers and that very few were affected by the Inquisition. That would be like saying that the Soviet system of political spying and the Gulag Archipelago had little influence on Russian families not directly affected or the Nazi regime’s harsh system of controls and concentration camps on most ordinary Germans or Austrians. In one sense, to the modern observer, the efforts by the Inquisitions in Lima, Cartagena and Mexico City become negative only because they were bureaucratized into a persecuting regime that prevented the free flow of ideas and the untrammeled development of the creative arts in the New World. To a great extent, in Spanish-speaking America and Portuguese Brazil, the distances between metropolitan centres and rural regions were barriers to efficiency similar to that in Europe. One needs to add as well the diversity of peoples, languages and cultures in their jurisdiction, stretching from South, Central and North America, and including the West Indies and the Philippines.26 We would also add the inefficiency of state infrastructures and communications was too great to let the pulleys and wheels and ropes of the contraption function smoothly all the time. But even without any smoothness of operation, the painful consequences were enormous. The paid and voluntary agents of the Holy Office were able to ensure constant or direct interference in most people’s ordinary lives, to be sure.27 However, we are not talking about direct influence in the sense of arrests, lengthy imprisonments, and harsh penalties. We are talking about the climate of fear and intimidation, the constant and pervasive sense of insecurity, and the results of long-term censorship of ideas. We have suggested that what happened when this heavy black cloud settled over the entire Hispanic civilization was, for most people, but particularly for the New Christians, whether they thought and felt themselves to be Jewish in any way whatsoever, very close to a state of group autism: communication with others and with the self was difficult, expression of sincere anxieties and fears dangerous to the point of pathologically risky, and when people then withdrew into themselves, they raged in oblique manners, often in ritualized form, whether in the church-sanctioned acts of Tridentine piety that marks the intensity of worship and festival or in illicit aggressiveness, violence and self-destruction.28 The rituals of the Penitentes must be seen as at least part of this combination of licit enthusiasm and illicit antinomian self-violence. But that is not all. In another sense, though, the Inquisition was more than just the few hundred officials and the buildings they occupied, and thus more than the several hundred individuals and families they directly dealt with. It was more 26

27 28

Mariana Masera, “Literatura y canción popular en los cantares de presos en la cárceles de la Inquisición” in Mariana Masera, coord., La otra Nueva España, pp. 174–188. Ibid, p. 176. Ibid, p. 178.

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than a persecutory regime, though that is bad enough. With regard to the Penitentes and the Marranos on the Moradas in the northern fringes of New Spain, while any direct impact by the Holy Office was certainly rare, the cultural and psychological consequences are manifest: (1) Few if any books or ideas could flow into the territory once the settlers established themselves, despite the fact that there were several waves of migrants including New Christians — before Oñate’s official entrada, at the time of his efforts to establish a new vice-royalty in the north, after the putting down of the Pueblo Revolt. This was a matter not just of Jewish books and ideas, but any literature or information. (2) No institutions of education or cultural activity other than those informally set up among the settlers themselves were possible and so each generation would be more severely limited than the previous one, though old habits of mind could remain and evolve in their own way in play with the contextual and somewhat analogous limitations in the Hispanic settlers who were the mainstay of the Penitentes. (3) Awareness of the persecutions to the south, as well as resentment at the neglect by civil and church governments made the abandoned community self-reliant and distrustful of outsiders, a feeling that continued after Mexican Independence and occupation by United States territorial governments, as well as the arrival of Bishop Lamy and his French- and Italian-trained priests. The other important features of the Penitentes suggested by their sense of abandonment and neglect, such as pride in their own accomplishments and faith in the rituals they instituted, along with the creation of visual, musical and narrative works of art, needs to be balanced by the asymmetrical partnership, as it were, between the majority Hispanics and the minority Marranos. These few hundred New Christians, as we have indicated several times, brought with them habits of mind into New Mexico, southern Colorado, Arizona and parts of western Texas that supplemented the creative genius of their thousands of Hispanic neighbours. These habits of mind are qualities of imagination, intellectual and social organization, and we have qualified them using the gerundive term midrashing. We have done that because it is clear that the specific content of rabbinical learning had been virtually lost and most minhagim or local customs belonging to the Sephardim had also been curtailed. The customs that continued did so with two major debilities: first, they lost their connective tissue, and remained as virtually random pieces of cultural behaviour, not coherent, inter-related parts of a whole community life; and second, they lost their intellectual context and hence their historical and symbolic meanings. At the same time, we will not deny, in a compensatory way, these fragments of 450

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a former Jewish culture took on new and at best unorthodox meanings within the context of their association to the practices and beliefs of the Penitentes, which is not the same as either normative Mexican civilization nor more generally as Latin American Catholicism. Therefore, we can now set out more specifically what we have previously hinted at and spoken of in different places about these three categories that are designated as habits of mind: imagination, intellection and social organization.

HABITS OF MIND Two tasks of the beginning of life: to keep reducing your circle, and to keep making sure you’re not hiding somewhere outside it. Franz Kafka29 Like apples of gold in a silver setting is a word that is aptly spoken. A silver ring, an ornament of finest gold, is a wise rebuke to an attentive ear. Psalm 25: 11–12

The imagination — a term so important to Maimonides in our discussions of the Controversy between his followers and those of Nachmanides — involved here is motivated by at least three forces.30 In the first instance, it is generated by age-long practice in deriving meaningful accommodation of ancient textual narratives and arguments by treating these texts as constituted by written letters, that is, essentially as an alphabetic substance. Rather than words as signs of distant or invisible realities to be decoded as statements about something other than themselves, these words are taken as hieroglyphs or sacred objects whose reference is themselves, meaning they are things to be seen and heard (visual 29

30

Franz Kafka. The Zürau Aphorisms, No. 94, trans. Michael Hoffman, ed. Roberto Calasso (New York: Schocken Books, 2005) p. 93. For a different point of view, see Fischel, Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy who defines midrash as testimonium or proof-text “used to legitimize a new value, idea or belief. In its application an inventive reinterpretation of the authorizing canonical text is most often necessary which gives it a slightly, or even considerably, altered sense, a novel ‘twist, which is precisely the essence of ‘Midrash’ in its original and literary sense. This may be done in seriousness for vital legal and social reasons; it may also be done in ‘playful seriousness,’ or ‘serious playfulness’, as in the Hellenic-Hellenistic spoudaigeloion and its Talmudic equivalents” (p. 23). We have discussed more fully this question of the cross-over between classical satiric traditions and rabbinic discourses in Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice.

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signs and oral containers), as well as condensed, displaced and constitutive building blocks. Each letter, then, can be also a numerical cipher, an abbreviation for another letter or word or series of letters or words. Each Hebrew letter has a numerical value, or rather several, depending on which system is in use — by order in the alephbet and by manipulative reassemblies, such as aleph as 1 if taken as the first, or 22 if taken as the reverse-order last; it also has a hieroglyphic name, such as bet, house. A word can be an anagramme, and a series of words reduced to a single word by silencing all but its first or last letters. The rules are not infinite but large enough to allow for a great deal of play. Other games are played in misdrashing, such as finding new contexts for words, phrases, sentences and larger units of narrative, description or argumentation. But all this is fairly well known. What is new in the explanations used by a group such as Champ de Midrash is that midrashing occurs as a way of transforming people and events in society, rereading history for the purposes of political decision-making, and doctrinal matters are literalized into pseudo-history which in turn not only creates new facts on the ground but generates institutions to govern the manipulation of these pseudo-facts into potent historical forces.31 What the Champ du Midrash has done by enacting a retroversion (une rétroversion)32 turning the New Testament into Hebrew is to show that there never was anything like a historical life of Jesus and all the rest of the foundation of Christianity and the Church was performed on the basis of pseudo-facts and belief structures postulated upon them. We have suggested then further that this retroversion meant a re-judaization of the original documents and the processes used to create them. But this return to Judaism is not at all a return to rabbinical or Talmudic Judaism. Rather it is a turning back to the conditions which existed before the rabbis gained the upper hand, composed their foundational texts, and created the institutions to teach and apply their principles. A further distinction needs to be made. For while even the confused situation following the catastrophic events in the first centuries of the Common Era 31

32

Fischel sees this process in slightly different terms: “It seems . . . that legendarizations whether positive or negative are attached almost exclusively to ‘Founder Sages’ who created new schools, trends or ideas. As such they are related to the genres of heurmatology, i.e., lists, typologies and legends on the inventors of Greco-Roman culture. Our four [who entered PaRDeS] seem to be close to these founder sages who are well represented in talmudic culture” (Fischel, Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy, p. 32). In addition to the books by Bernard Dubourg adduced earlier and the articles produced by Marcel Mergui and others in Champ du Midrash, see Sandrick Le Maguer, Portrait d’Israël en jeune fille (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). A comment posted just a few months after the book first appeared on the publisher’s website by Claude Donadello of Montluçon who did not like this book and calls it an “[o]uvrage amphigourique, parfois abscons et pseudo-poétique,” and why not? Such an overly elaborate piece of nonsense and recondite poetic rigamarole may indeed be what the truth looks like after centuries of mistranslation and cultural impositions by persecuting institutions.

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saw a need for Jewish groups to undertake extreme measures of accommodation to the changes in their national, religious and spiritual circumstances, there remained a striking divide between those who made their adjustments within the parameters of the Law and those who transgressed. “Certain types of exegeses,” Faur reminds us, are regarded as illegitimate and offensive. Among those who have forfeited the Worldto-Come and fellowship with the people of Israel are those engaged in “derashot shel dofi” (“exposition of faltering interpretations”). This category includes all the Gnostic, Christological, and antinomial exegeses.33

In particular as pertinent to the distinction between what is licit within the broad and various enterprise of rabbinical midrash and what belongs to the other side of satanic exegesis there are these points to be made: 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

Christian commentators tend to follow the Platonic notions of syntax and interpretation, assuming, as Faur explains, “a theory . . . [of] a priori knowledge of the ‘ideal Forms.’” Hence, the task of the exegete is to replace the text to be interpreted by another, higher truth, aletheia, one that does not reside in the text per se, its words, letters, or sounds. “Accordingly,” claims Faur, “in Christian tradition the New Testament displaces the Hebrew Scriptures precisely by being its ‘true’ interpretation.” The rabbis, however, somewhat like the Stoics, interpreted the text by sticking to the words, letters and sounds, and by drawing connections between them. As a set of semiotic symbols, as Faur puts it, the scriptural text would be “surveyed” so that “every aspect of the text could be ‘connected’ through derash with one another,” meaning as well “even those elements void of lexical meaning, like defective and full spellings, particles, prepositions, calligraphic ornamentation, and even the shape of letters” — they all “acquire ‘significance’ through canonical exegesis.” Except for those interpretations which seek to invalidate the law itself and destroy the people and nation of Israel, all interpretations are valid. They stand separate from the intentions of the author, since the Law and its interpretation was handed to Israel at Sinai and God Himself is subject to both the Law and its interpretations. “What was ratified at the covenant of Sinai,” claims Faur, “was not the ‘intention’ of the lawgiver, but the actual law, as understood by those who received it.”

Because of this, we can suggest that when the isolated, alienated and anxious members of the Penitente community, New and Old Christians alike, came 33

Faur, “Law and Hermeneutics,” pp. 1676–1677.

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to the textualization of their faith, cut off as they were from virtually all instruction — that is, mediated interpretation by friars or priests, let alone books of guidance, such as catechisms — they passed through the veil of illusion placed over those texts by hundreds of years of Church practice and discovered what was always there all along. To their surprise, they rediscovered its secret meaning. Or so they thought. The secret (sod) is, however, no secret.34 The original Hebrew Gospels and associated documents were that part of Judaism that separated itself out from the rest because the crises of the Destruction of the Temple and the End of the National State could not be sustained without radical reinterpretations of the sacred texts and re-integration of the social structures along very different lines. The variations that emerged became increasingly incompatible as different groups organized themselves to confront the sequillae of the multiple catastrophes. Jews who had absorbed Hellenistic philosophy in Alexandria and Rome went in directions quite distinct from those who developed the institutions and principles already existing in the synagogue and the Pharisaic movement, especially when they shifted their centre of balance from Jerusalem to Yavnah and the academic circles who were redacting what became the Mishnah and later the Gamora. 34

“It is not asserted here that the tannaitic scholars read Epicurus’ letters, recited Lucretius, went to school with the Church Fathers or had Herculanean papyri in their possession. It is claimed, however, that certain beliefs, maxims, habits and legends belonging to the academic lore of or on the Epicureans were common knowledge in the ancient world, that they spread abroad by popular media and personal encounters — whether employing Greek or Aramaic — and that they played a significant role in the academic tradition of scholar-bureaucracies which resembled each other to a certain degree and were in contact with each other in the classical, Christian, and Jewish worlds in the first two to three centuries of Roman Imperial times” (Fischel, Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy p. 34). A bit further he also says that “Epicurean shadings of talmudic teachings derive from encounters with the rhetoric of Greco-Roman administrations and public orators” (p.107, n. 56). His conclusion, as it were, that these writers from different camps shared a repertoire of basic patterns of ideas, formulaic expressions, and narrative motifs in a “cultural environment” through a process he terms oicotypification (p. 114, n. 1). On this process see Elena Braduñas, “If You Kill a Snake — The Sun Will Cry” Folktale Type 425-M: A Study in Oicotype and Folk Belief ” Lituanus: Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences 21:1 (Spring 1975) where she cites C. W. von Sydow, 1948 “Folktale Studies and Philology: Some points of View” in The Study of Folklore, Alan Dundes, ed., (Prentice Hall, N. J. 1965, pp. 219–242): “The process of oicotypification, he states, “consists of a certain unification of the variants within one and the same linguistic or cultural area on account of isolation from other areas” (von Sydow 1946:238). He further explains that “changes brought about by various kinds of mutation, and by oicotypification, are naturally of the greatest weight for a scientific study of folklore, and the results of such a study cannot, even by the best methods, be correct unless they are based on a right knowledge of the life of the folktale, and the laws by which it is governed” (von Sydow 1948:239).”

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The Jewish messianists and the apocalyptists formed themselves into another set of institutions which increasingly divorced themselves from the various groups who found themselves for a second time defeated and scattered following the Bar Kokhba Uprising and the Alexandrian revolts. This new organization not only took into itself those God Fearers, or partly converted Hellenistic pagans, but also and most significantly translated their primary texts into Greek. In so doing, we now can see, they lost touch with the midrashic enterprise and found themselves trying to make sense out of seemingly meaningless narratives and creedal assertions. By great effort, they rationalized away many of the difficulties, and literalized rhetorical constructs into pseudo-historical persons, places, events and ideas, synthesized them with Greek philosophy and science, and eventually superimposed these new stories and arguments on to the cult of the emperor. Along the way, as this Christianity in the act of self-inventing, attempted two contradictory strategies: on the one hand, they radically distinguished themselves from Jews — and projected into the Pharisees all that they found uncomfortable, incompatible and contrary to the wish to assimilate into Hellenistic civilization and its mystery religions and religious philosophies — in order to prove they were not enemies of the emperor and to claim privileges as Roman citizens; on the other, to give to themselves an historical depth and an extensive body of sacred writings they felt necessary to make sense of their newly translated Gospels and Epistles, and, aside from Revelation, acquired apocalyptic, messianic and wisdom texts, they claimed to be the New Israel, whose New Covenant replaced the Old, just as their narrative of Jesus fulfilled and transcended the prophetic promises of the Hebrew prophets. Meanwhile, Rabbinic Judaism created itself based on what would be by the sixth century of the Common Era two major new documents, the two Talmuds of Jerusalem and of Babylonia, along with a host of midrashim and other Pharisaic commentaries and Aramaic targumim or interpretive translations. This extended process of self-creation was always itself in dialectical relation to a series of on-going crises. Partly, as we have seen, Judaism had to re-imagine itself in relation to the loss of the Temple and the priestly cult of sacrifices, as well as the apparent closing down of the autonomous national state and all its legal, educational, and social institutions, and to the messianic hope of a divine empire transcending national boundaries and historical limitations. But that was not all. For as Faur argues, one of the key decisions taken by the sages of Israel was that the nation of Israel could continue to exist in Exile (Galut) without a specific territory. Whereas Christianity developed its own accommodations to the Fall of the Temple, as can be seen somewhat obscurely in Acts of the Apostles where there is a transference of political power and sacred authority from the Jerusalem-based caliphate of Jesus’ brothers and cousins to the outsider Saul/ Paul and thus from those who tried to maintain a direct hands-on link from 455

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the Master to the Disciples to those who now claimed to receive their faith and authority from the spiritualized Christ, Judaism made specific substitutions for the physical Temple, the substantive cult of sacrifices, and the other laws and regulations pertaining to the national life of Israel in its own territory. As such alternatives to the old Judaism developed — and for many generations they existed side by side with what would be clarified as rabbinical Judaism — the Sages had to re-define themselves and invent interpretative strategies to midrash the confusing differences into a coherent, logically consistent imaginative and intellectual civilization, as both Jacob Neusner and José Faur have argued at great length in the last several years. To a great extent all the alternatives to rabbinical Judaism faded away. Alexandrine and Roman versions of assimilationist Greek Judaism, as in Philo Judaeus and Flavius Josephus, as well as the Septuagint interpretative translation of the Bible — they lapsed, except as background to the growing Christian churches. The Samaritans and Gnostic Judaism, as well as the proto-Karaites and the older Essenes in Egypt and on the shores of the Dead Sea, also faded away into obscurity. But the more the various versions of Christianity gained strength among non-Jews, the more this radical Jewish heresy posed serious challenges to the rabbis and sages and required that they make decisions about who and what they were in response. For this reason, a millennium and a half later and on the other side of the world, when a group like the Marranos and the Hispanics came together to create the Penitentes they found, probably with no inkling of what was happening, that their understanding of Christianity was not recognizable by the authorities of the Church — just as the modalities of Crypto-Judaism set out in detail by Gitlitz and others seem completely unrecognisable to American Jewish communities.35 So though the Penitentes re-judaized the story of Jesus’ Passion and reconstructed the sacramental system of the Church without priests or a Eucharistic Mass, the Old Christian settlers did not feel in themselves that they were heretical. Indeed, they believed they were continuing — and in a more appropriate way — the teachings of the Third Order of Franciscans. For their part, the New Christians, who were not at ease in the pre-Tridentine and especially not the post-Tridentine versions of Catholicism, found a more familiar and comfortable space for themselves in the Penitente community, with its high degree of community involvement with social work, pastoral care, education and control over religious rituals and holidays. That they were out of step with rabbinical Judaism was either not realized at all or, if it were, did 35

This is because most are Ashkenazi and/or not well-educated in their own historical backgrounds further than the Holocaust or the late nineteenth-century conditions of their East European family histories.

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not bother them because they had inherited a profound disappointment with a Sephardic society that had failed to stand up against adversity, protect its members from persecution, or provide a workable alternative to conversion. That is, I suggest, in regard to this isolated, small group, because their ancestors had already moved away from the mainline Judaism of Iberia when it shifted from its traditional base in Gaonic and Maimonidean rationalism to the new mystical and irrational beliefs of a Nachmanidean religion. The kabbalah that grew up in Sefad (in the northern part of the land of Israel, then under Ottoman rule) out of the meeting of Iberian refugees and Ashkenazi migrants does not seem to have touched the thoughts or the behaviour of the southwestern community. They were therefore immune to the enthusiasm and then the disappointment of the Shabbatian fiasco.

PARADIGMS FOR JEWS IN A NON-JEWISH WORLD If leaving the land that is natural for you is difficult . . . do not regret this land of yours whose people curses you because you are far from their faith. — Jacob Ibn Habib36

Friedrich Niewöhner discusses three authors at varying periods who address a similar problem of how Jews can deal with the sometimes overwhelming lure of the non-Jewish, hegemonic civilizations that always surround them in the Galut and impinge deeply into their consciousness.37 Although not each of these thinkers lived through a major catastrophe that affected the entire Jewish community in their time, nevertheless each passed through traumatic moments in their lives and reached paradigmatic conclusions — that is, that stand as exemplary ways of dealing with such problems. These three examples may help us understand now, as we reach the conclusion of the book about the Marranos and the Penitentes, what the relationship is between Jews and Christians in this particular, isolated place in Jewish history. 36

37

Cited in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Exile and Expulsion in Jewish History” in Benjamin R. Gampel, ed., Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–1648 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1997) p. 17. Faur explains: “In its barest form, the Exile (galut) is a political theory stemming from the Jewish concept of law. It means that the Jewish nation was not dissolved with the territorial loss of the land of Israel. The claim rests on the principle that Jewish sovereignty is not predicated on the control of a particular geographical area, but on the law establishing the internal legal, religious, and cultural institutions governing the Jewish people” (“Law and Hermeneutics in Rabbinic Jurisprudence,” p. 1669).

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Historically, from the original separation of Avram/Avraham from his parents’ culture of idolatry, through each of the other patriarchs and matriarchs in Scripture, right through to the formative periods of rabbinical tradition, Judaism has taken shape in response to national crises. We have seen how Jacob Neusner and José Faur have explained the formation of talmudic Judaism as a major shift in the imagination of rabbis to the Fall of the Temple, the end of the national state, and the scattering of people throughout the then known world. We have also suggested that beginning with the Maimonidean Controversies and on into the period of Mass Conversions, Persecutions by Inquisition and Statutes of Purity of Blood, and Expulsion the Sephardim also responded with profound changes in their outlook on the world, history and things spiritual.38 Niewöhner has offered three models for the situation in which persecution and dispersion are dealt with by Jews who are also confronted with the problem of large-scale conversions, some forced, some expedient or strategic, but all shockingly long-term. Rather than the lachrymose version of this history in which Jews are always passive victims and reshape their life in midrashic ways that seem only to influence their own children and grandchildren, leaving the outside nations (the goyim) either completely unaware of these changes or hostile and angry, there are indications both in the major biblical and rabbinical texts themselves, when read properly and incisively as midrashim rather than as purely archival records of real events, or in supplemental narratives and poetic statements, as well as in physical remains, paintings, music, and festivals, evidence that Jews were more active, aggressive, vengeful and influential. Yosef Haim Yerushalami, who has surveyed the question of Jewish history and memory as textual matters in his Zakhor, barely touches on midrash, other than to say, in passing, that it was one early mode of explaining these sacred texts. For him, as for other professional historians in the academy, historiography is premised on principles laid out in the course of the nineteenth century for secular, objective discussions of the past. As in the History of Science, the History of History is progressive and studied in stages of increasing achievement of what is currently taught as a discipline in universities. Jewish History, in this sense, must fit within the established scholarly norms. But Niewöhner offers a different perspective, one that begins to approach the complex models we 38

The converso/Crypto-Jewish/Marrano problems may go back much further in Iberian history, as one may see in the various canons in such documents as the Council of Toledo of 633 CE, where the Church warns its members to be alert to insincere Jewish converts and to tricks of secret judaizing; see E.H. Lindo, The History of the Jews of Spain and Portugal from the Earliest Times to their Final Expulsion from those Kingdoms, and their subsequent Dispersion, with complete translations, of all the Laws made Respecting them during their Long Establishment in the Iberia Peninsula (1848) reprinted by Burt Franklin (New York, 1970).

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have used in this book. Thus this choice of three paradigmatic authors give three kinds of Jewish response to the problematic crisis of how to live as a Jew in a non-Jewish world. One way of Jews managing their subordinate, marginal and trivialized status within the history of non-Jewish civilization, of course, is to submit, convert, and do one’s best to assimilate to the otherness around, even if this entails a degree of self-deception or leads to a constant need to project outwards the guilt and shame of the betrayal and hence to make of the convert an active propagandist against Judaism. The trouble is that out of the ranks of such renegades there arise the worst enemies of Israel, worst in the sense that (a) they bring into the camp of the hostile other knowledge that can be used to attack the community in ways and in places hitherto free of such barbs; (b) their defection is a public shame to Israel, particularly if the renegade has reputation among the gentiles as a representative of the Jews; (c) the crossing-over creates a precedent for the young, impressionable and vacillating. The first paradigmatic author that Niewöhner writes about is the earliest of the three and significantly, like the other two, within the orbit of Arabicspeaking Muslim civilization. He is a Jew who became a renegade and an apostate by converting to Islam and using his new position to write satirically against Jews and Judaism on behalf of his new coreligionists. Samuel ben Yahya ben Al-Maghribi39 published his Silencing the Jews in 1163 in Baghdad. He is the author referred to six years later in the Rambam’s Letter on Apostasy (1172),40 and hence Maghbribi’s position became a notorious paradigm of Jewish apostasy well beyond the immediate circumstances of its original composition. Like other Sephardim who became active anti-Semitic polemicists in medieval Spain, bringing to the attention of the Church the importance of talmudic learning to rabbinical Judaism and undermining the authority of the rabbinate among ordinary Iberian Jews because of the seeming persuasiveness of arguments based on halachic discussions, midrashic narratives and other aspects of talmudic learning, al-Maghribi is more dangerous than the true Muslims and the Old Christians: as the Rambam points out, such apostates are really despised and distrusted by the leaders of the religion they wish to serve, since facility with Jewish texts and rabbinics only reveals to these opponents the falsity and foolishness of the so-called learned debates.41 To Jews, therefore, the activity of these renegades is more than self-defeating: it is self-destructive. For although they seem to gain prestige by the number of converts they attract and by the depth of the despair they instil among Jews, they do not realize 39 40

41

Al-Samaw’al al-Maghribi. Not to be confused with the Iggeret Teman or Epistle to Yemen. Cp. Bujis, “Introduction”, Maimonides: Critical Essays, p. 5. Niewöhner, “Are the Founders of Religions Imposters?” p. 235.

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that to the leaders of Islam and Christianity they are still Jews and engaged in Judaizing practices. A second model suggested by Niewöhner to operate in a non-Jewish world is to reject as false, stupid and evil the religious authorities in the hegemonic civilization; and it may be expressed sometimes by making external compromises to minimize the consequences of the decision and to allow the maximum of freedom of worship, practice and participation in commerce, finance, and professional affairs; or it may be expressed by quiet, peaceful withdrawal, reducing all contacts with the hegemonic society to bare essentials and living as fully as possible according to the Law as compatible with the minority status in the Galut; or this superiority may articulate itself in a more cunning manner with attempts made to provide essential services to the ruling powers by a small elite on behalf of the majority of Jews, who themselves live quietly apart, protected by the influential court Jews. The paradigmatic representative of this second option is none other than Moses Maimonides, the Rambam himself. It is not a position he develops in all of his books, certainly not in his major commentaries and philosophical works, but it is expressed in his important and well-known Letter on Apostasy to the Yemenites, and because this document did gain sufficient currency in his time and subsequently it is sufficient to merit paradigmatic status. By responding to Salomon al-Maghribi, Rambam addresses an imminent danger,42 makes a politically acute argument, and puts aside the more philosophical or spiritual terms he uses in the Mishnah Torah and The Guide for the Perplexed.43 His purpose in this responsum, according to Niewöhner, is not to set out a subtle and nuanced position, with all the Rambam’s usual thoroughness of detail, but to concentrate on the practical issue at hand, which is to encourage the Yemenites in their loyalty to Judaism and provide them with ready answers needed in public debates with Muslim preachers and political officials. The Rambam gives this threatened branch of Judaism the historical evidence it 42

43

It should not be forgotten that Maimonides and his family were forced to flee their native Cordoba when the fanatical Alhomades took over, with a period of apostasy — as anousim themselves — before they could relocate to more tolerant conditions. As Etienne Gilson writes, “In 1159 [that is, only one year after the escape from Spain] the family fled to Fez, where the situation was but slightly more favorable. It was there that Maimonides wrote his Epistle on Apostasy, in order to bring back to the truth those Jews who had allowed themselves to be drawn into Islam, or rather who had succumbed to an almost irresistible pressure. The dangerous repercussions of this publication forced him to leave Morocco with his family on April 18, 1165. After a brief stay in Palestine he went to Alexandria. It is in the Egyptian city of Fustat [now a suburb of Cairo] that the family finally settled down in relative peace” (“Homage to Maimonides” in Baron, ed., Essays on Maimonides, p. 20). Gilson calls it several times the Guide for the Irresolute (“Homage to Maimonides” in Baron, ed., Essays on Maimonides, p. 24).

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needs to counter the charges brought against biblical claims for the unique and foundational nature of the revelation of the Law given at Sinai and the covenant entered into by the entire nation of Israel then living on behalf of all subsequent generations. But it was not just the Yemenites to whom the pep talk was addressed, obliquely it was to all Jews at a time of increasing dangers. Nor is it merely a conventional trope that says “Every generation of Jews sees itself in danger of being the last,” but because, as Etienne Gilson remarks (at a moment when the as yet unrecognized Shoah was beginning): “Wherever he went, he saw his coreligionists in hiding, denying their faith, and outwardly adopting rites and symbols which were not theirs.”44 In particular, The Epistle answers the mocking challenge posed by alMaghribi, in the words of Niewöhner: The Epistle to Yemen is not only a response to a concrete situation in Yemen. Rather, it must also be regarded as settling of accounts with the philosophical position developed by al-Maghribi in his Silencing the Jews, after he had converted to Islam in 1163. In this text, al-Maghribi described in detail the messianic movement triggered off by the impostor David Alroy in 1147.45

This mockery of the susceptibility of poorly educated Jews to the claims of a false messiah is doubly dangerous: first, because it exposes the Jewish community to ridicule by alerting the authorities in Islamic lands to the weakness of the intellectual and spiritual grounding of Judaism; and second, no less damning, because it deflates Jewish pride in its role as a Chosen People with a unique mission in the world. The satanic midrash woven by the apostate from loose strands in the fabric of rabbinic learning both covers over the foolishness of his own endeavour since the community of Israel is indeed unable any longer to draw on the strengths of its own tradition, now that it has lost touch with the proper instruction necessary to keep the tradition alive, nor to recognize the flimsiness of al-Maghribi’s glib alternatives; and second the illusion also seems to persuade the audience that the Islamic texts, education and rule are superior precisely because they have received a more potent, perfect and proper revelation through their Prophet. The Rambam’s programme in The Epistle is to persuade Yemenite Jews that they need not despair, need not be ashamed of their traditions, and need to persist in holding to the learning, customs and beliefs they have inherited from their ancestors. There is little room for intellectual subtleties in such an argument since the people cannot hold securely to their faith if they begin to consider the ways in which other religions, whether Islam or Christianity, share in many of the revealed truths given to Israel, not least of which is their adherence to the 44 45

Gilson, “Homage to Maimonides,” Baron, ed., Essays on Maimonides, p. 21. Niewöhner, “Are the Founders of Religions Impostors” p. 236.

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Noachic Code. In other words, faced by a crisis of large-scale conversions away from Judaism — imminent or underway — The Epistle deals with the issue in such terms as avoid any concessions to the other side. A third way offered by Niewöhner is more skeptical, cynical and satiric, as it involves decisions taken that none of the three major monotheistic religions can be right — true and valid — unless all are accepted as revealed versions of the correct faith, and since they cannot all be true, therefore none is. That being so, according to this point of view, the strategic choices are made on contingent conditions, determined by political advantage and social expediency, the conversion by the Jew to either Christianity or Islam reinforcing the grounds of the cynical choice by its lack of meaning. In an extreme form, the scepticism becomes aggressive atheism, with a materialistic philosophy and science, although the identity of the converted Jews still has to be hidden when the dominant institutions require public allegiance to some form of religious confession. All subsequent decisions and actions follow cynically because they address only the standards of self-interest, community safety, or rational truth which in itself is always temporary given the defining limits of such an ideology. Actually, however, the third representative philosopher, Solomon Ibn Verga, takes a somewhat nuanced approach to the question of how converted Jews live in a world of goyim. His comments lead us to a new consideration of the Marranos and the Penitentes in the American southwest, though he himself never travelled to the New World. While there is no evidence that his books were available to the men and women who migrated to Mexico, from among whom a small number took the further step of separating from the small Crypto-Jewish communities in the larger towns and cities of New Spain, his ideas do seem relevant, and because they arise from options generally available throughout the Sephardic Diaspora and the so-called Nation of Portuguese-Spanish Jews, we can consider them as relevant to our discussions. This sixteenth-century Marrano author, Ibn Verga, in his Shebet Yehuda (1507) wrote the following: Deep in their hearts, the Jews really do remain Jews despite all measures taken by the Christians, and it has long been known that three kinds of water are to be considered irreclaimable: the baptismal water on a Jew, the water that flows into the sea, and the water in wine. But the reason for this is as follows: in the imagination of the Jews who have seen those mighty and holy places, those miracles and the heavenly fire during the act of legislation, all this remains very vivid and has become as it were a part of their very nature; it would be going against their own nature to abandon this idea which was first impressed upon their hearts, and to accept a new one. (Heb. 17–18, Gr. 33–34)46 46

Cited by Friedrich Niewöhner, “Are the Founders of Religions Impostors?” in Pines and Yovel, Maimonides and Philosophy, p. 243.

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This seems a kind of essentialist argument based on a biological or genetic view of Jews being distinct from all other people because of their basic nature. It is a statement that denies the power of the Church and its sacrament of baptism to change that Jewish nature, and that, of course, what the Statutes of Blood Purity were all about. By saying this, Ibn Varga defies both the Inquisition because there is no way, other than extirpating Jews from this world, that there can be a genuine conversion and also those former Jews who now profess to be practicing and believing Christians because whether they are sincere or not there are no grounds for taking their profession seriously. However, the reason given for this persistence of Jewishness is not based on biological race. The argument is historical. Ibn Varga claims along with the ancient rabbis and with Maimonides that because all Jews currently alive had ancestors who were present at Sinai and who personally witnessed the miraculous events accompanying the granting of the Law to Moses on their behalf they all are part of a living continuous tradition that makes it impossible for them to deny the legitimacy of the Law, the validity of the oral and documentary traditions of interpretation, and the consequent discrediting of all other claims to a different and other revelation. Thus, it is not by the persuasiveness of the Law itself nor a faith in its efficacy in assuring a messianic future and salvation to all who adhere to this Torah and its mitzvoth, but something else that guarantees the truth of the tradition. That something else is precisely the impact of the event itself: the wonders at Sinai were so vivid they impressed themselves into the memory of all who were then present and further into the national memory (morasha) of all subsequent generations, this national memory being constituted both by the written Torah and the oral Torah. We have touched earlier in this book on the concept of such a vivid representation of what is otherwise silent and invisible — the notion of what ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians enargeia.47 When we discussed enargeia then we were concerned with the way the Penitentes, in order to compensate for the absence of properly constituted clergy and legitimate performance of Eucharist, acted out rituals of bloody imitations of Jesus Christ’s Passion, the infliction of pain, the shedding of blood, and the corporate bonding of 47

Fabrizio Lollini in his notes on Carlo Ginzburg’s Indagini su Piero, Il Battesimo, Il Ciclo di Arezzo, La Flagellazione di Urbino published in 1982–2001 (“Storia e narrazione: retorche della verità e stratageia della finzione” in Engramma 52 (November 2006) deals with this theoretical problem, not so much in regard to the series of Renaissance paintings at the centre of Ginzburg’s essays, but to questions of fiction and history, in other words, to the way in which events are narrated, persons described, and ideas embedded in time and space. Following Lawrence Stone, Lollini suggests a sequence of connections: historical narrative → description → vividness → truth, which is the kind of rhetorical/ theoretical approach Ginzburg has been arguing for at least as a balance to the positivist historiography based on historical documents and other “pieces of evidence” and to the contemporary post-modernist scepticism wherein there is no truth to be found, only modes and forms of “positionality.”

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the occasion all made an intense impression on the individual and group consciousness and was embedded in their collective memory. This sense of enargeia draws upon its etymological aspects: (1) it is a vividness that concentrates a powerful light of representational imagery into the mind of the audience who then have a memory that replaces all prior versions of reality and truth and who are consequently resistant to arguments from reason or evidence. (2) it is a re-presentation in the sense of a selective, well-structured and carefully articulated speech-event, creating what T. S. Elliot might call “an objective correlative” to the ideas — signifying images — the orator or lawyer wishes to convey; and (3) though not related in the real history of the word, it recalls the sense of energia as a forceful burst or release of energy condensed in the performance. Our problem in this book is to determine whether or how far the self-flagellations and self-crucifixions of the Penitentes, as practiced especially by the small number of Marranos in the brotherhood, represent a distinct interpretation of the orthodox pre-Tridentine Catholic Eucharistic text. Does this ritual discover in the blood and the pain such an intense vividness (enargeia) that it can replace, redefine and recontextualize the usual performances of the priest in the mass or the dramatic imitations by friars in missionizing performances or the meditational images in santos and bultos created by local artists and artisans to help focus worshippers on the mysteries of their faith? Whatever the response may be by Old Christian members of the fraternity and by Catholic exegetes, is there another — an altogether different kind of — interpretation for the New Christians who were once Jews? Is it, finally, a theologoumenon (a messianic idea embodied in the appearance of an event) or a midrash?

MIDRASHING THE MIDRASH When we last discussed midrashing, we were concerned with concepts of historicity and degrees of vividness or enargeia, putting the midrash on the side of rhetoric rather than factual and event-based developments, and its evidence considered to become persuasive, not because it derived from trustworthy testimonials in official archives, but because it was so powerful in its expression and thus its ability to create fantasia, images in the mind that replaced or recreated memories and culturally-taught concepts. We also started to look at the group of scholars in France collectively calling themselves Champ du Midrash, whose self-appointed task was to take the findings of Bernard Dubourg and Marcel 464

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Mergui into territories more and more vital to the perpetuation of Christian myth — the notion that the primary documents were historical, as well as true. They have begun to cut away the false perceptions about the Gospels, the rest of the New Testament, the non-canonical books associated with the primitive Jesus people, and, then, the apocalyptic and messianic documents of inter-testimental Judaism, showing that all have little or no basis at all in actual events or deal with real people. Rather, they are rhetorically-constructed texts, sometimes conceived formally as commentaries and exegesis of previously existing texts, sometimes created out of whole cloth, but with threads and patterns derived from those earlier books, whether biblical, post-biblical or extra-biblical. Most recently, Champ du Midrash has moved further into radical ideas. Now they are examining the foundational texts of the Bible and of rabbinical Judaism itself, showing that Scripture already always is a midrashic experiment, often midrashing its own earliest texts, and that rabbinical writings — Mishnah, Tosafot, Midrashim, Talmuds — carry on this enterprise with wit, flair, and anxiety. In an interview between Sandrick Le Maguer and Maurice Mergui, Mergui, the founder of Champ du Midrash, reports that in a conversation he had with Bernard Dubourg shortly before his death in 1992, the author of L’invention du Jésus spoke of midrash as herev pypiyot, a double-edged sword.48 After ten years pondering Dubourg’s term, Mergui claims he now understands it as the “armed mouth” or the “weapon of preaching”. The two chief elements of this weapon are first of all what Dubourg calls “retroversion”, the translation of the Christian texts back into their original Hebrew, basing all further interpretations on this fundamental cultural and historical reality, that they were neither written in Greek (koine or demotic) nor in Aramaic (Chaldean); for once that is done — and it is no easy matter because the choice of words and the structure of the syntax emerge only as the re-judaizing process continues — the richness, subtlety and deep-allusiveness of the midrashim can begin to appear; second, the re-adaptation of the rabbinic techniques of this exegetical technology, which has been going on for thousands of years, to the conditions of the formative period of both rabbinical Judaism and primitive Christianity. Most radical of all the ideas that come out of Dubourg’s work and their further elaboration in Champ du Midrash is the assertion that “Christianity is an internal tendency within Judaism, as legitimate as any other”.49 One of the very few historians to accept Dubourg’s propositions is Raoul Vaneigem. In The Resistance to Christianity: The Heresies at the Origins of the 18th Century, 48

49

Sandrick Le Maguer, “L’invention de Doubourg” Interview with Marcel Mergui (2002) online at http://lemidrash.free.fr/JudaismeChristianisme (Seen 14/09/2008). “Dubourg montre que le Christianisme est une tendence interne du Judaisme, aussi legitime que les autres”.

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Vaneigem rejects the notion of a historical Jesus or any related people, events, places or ideas. He argues that the crisis that confronted the Land of Israel and the Jews during the Roman occupation period was unique only to the extent that it produced two new religions, not that it resulted in a dispersion of the people, a re-imagining of their past, or the recreation of their foundational documents. The “mix of forcible exile and voluntary emigration” was already in place from the mid-sixth century BCE and the Babylonian Conquest. Each catastrophe produced schisms, syntheses, and assimilation to surrounding civilization, with dialectical reactions and breakings away. By the time of the Jewish Wars that Josephus wrote about, Israel was divided still further into Hellenists, Samaritans and Jews, with the Jews split between Pharisees or proto-rabbis, Sadducees or Graeco-Roman assimilationists, Zealots, Essenes and so on and so forth. Some tended towards Hellenic philosophies, others towards Gnosticism, others towards messianic fanaticism or quietism, others towards intellectual and juridical scholarship in place of a temple cult. Those of the messianic and apocalyptic bent, Vaneigem says, could also be, under its harshly Christianized form, the only one that was retained by the Catholic canon . . . ”

MYTHOS There are two types of Anous that I will bring forth: the Anous as the “relapso”, that is, the coerced Israelite who returns to Judaism (and who is by all means a full-fledged Jew) and the Anous who remained in the faith forced upon their parents (Christianity). Both show immense ties and continuation to Sepharad. — David Ramírez50 As a Jew, the story of the Conversos is not — it cannot — be closed. Our tradition maintains that something special in their manners and outlook has endured . . . We should open our hearts and our ears to them. — José Faur51

The first myth is that there were no Jews in the settlement of northern Mexico of the sixteenth century, or that the Jews who went were New Christians and had already forgotten or suppressed what they were, so that their children and 50

51

David Ramírez, “Sephardim: La rosa, la espina y abeja: Crosspollenization and Strength in Jewish Culture” Sephardic Heritage Update, p. 1. José Faur, “Jews, Conversos and Native Americans: The Iberian Experience” Annual of Rabbinic Judaism 3 (2000) 95.

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their children’s children had no knowledge of who and what they were, and therefore that all those people who today cry out that they are the descendants of anousim, the forced converts who endured so much for so long, are liars and knaves or worse. Another myth is that the Jews of Old Spain hid their identity in a disguise of Catholicism and went across the seas to escape from the persecutions of the Church and lived with the simple people of northern Mexico, shared in their sufferings, participated in their penitential rites, but nevertheless remembered who they were and passed on to their children the memory of Judaism, so that those who now claim their identity as Jews should be recognized, honoured and welcomed back into the Jewish community, not as converts or sinners, but as living witnesses to the enduring strength of their ancestors’ faith. The presence of the Marranos in northern New Spain is, as we have said several times already, not just problematical, but also virtually impossible to explain, unbelievable in terms of the implications. It is a voluntary move away from civilization into a desert filled with ghosts and demons. As Jacob Neusner puts it in the “Preface” to his latest book, Theological and Philosophical Premises of Judaism, Classical Judaism imagined the people Israel’s situation in three aspects to be unique among the nations of the earth. The nations lived in unclean lands contaminated by corpses and redolent of death. They themselves are destined to die without hope of renewed life after the grave. They were prisoners of secular time, subject to the movement and laws of history in its inexorable logic. Heaven did not pay attention to what they did and did not care about their conduct, so long as they observed the basic decencies mandated by the commandments that applied to the heirs of Noah, seven fundamental rules in all.52

Though Elijah Benmozegh and José Faur are not so harsh their interpretation of the fate of the others in the world beyond Israel, this view does present us with the dilemma that faced the Marranos who found themselves doubly alienated from their own remembered selves as Jews. First, in that their ancestors had chosen to become Christians rather than to accept death or exile; second, that they now themselves chose to go beyond the fringes of Spanish civilization and the last remnants of a secret Jewish world in the larger cities and towns of New Spain. But because the lands now included in the United States were such a wasteland, far beyond the imaginable signs of any kind of viable culture or commercial zone, there must have been another reason why intelligent men and women, no matter how separated from their learned and spiritual traditions, would want to live there. It may be suggested that there is another 52

Jacob Neusner, Theological and Philosophical Premises of Judaism (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2008).

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mythical reason, that is, an unconscious purpose that lies deeper than voluntary motivations, more meaningful than rational explanations, and outside the range of normal academic or political understanding. This place beyond the horizons of recognition resembles the wild, empty tracts of Sinai in which the Children of Israel wandered for forty years before they were able to cross over the River Jordan into the Promised Land. Having left Eretz Mitzrayim, Egypt as the Land of Darkness and Idolatry, they were not quite free of the taint of their hundreds of years of servitude, of slavery under the whip of Pharaoh, of ignorance and misapprehensions as to who they were, what they were waiting for, and what lay before them in God’s plan. This needs to be understood in terms of a messianic myth, and this is precisely what Isaac Abravanel attempted to do when he was forced to leave his family, friends, and life-work behind and flee to Naples and then to even freer Italian cities. Trying to understand what had happened to him and his people, Abravanel, caught up in the kabbalistic and messianic visions of Judaism in extended crisis, imagined his plight in terms that made his experiences meaningful as an extended midrash on the Book of Exodus. However comforting such a mythical narrativization of Sephardic exile may have been to the refugees from Peninsular Spain, whether they left early and of their own free will or later in despair and disappointment at their failed effort to weather out the storm in the guise of New Christians, the midrash took a different turn when applied to the strange adventures of those Marranos — the confused, indecisive and forever-searching ones — who crossed the seas and searched for a place to exorcise their doubts, anxieties and humiliations in a re-embodied anamnesis of the Exodus story. José Faur points out that several lines in Proverbs 25 have been used to develop a rabbinical theory of double-transgression of the supposed pshat or received reading of Scriptural texts. The first transgression engages with the sacred writings in the normal ways of PaRDeS in order to accommodate the canonical text to the changes the current crisis in Judaism — there always seems to be a crisis of one sort or another — and thus find a way to imagine one’s way out of the difficulties and reconfirm one’s trust and faith in the Law. The second transgression has usually been viewed as a satanic midrash in that it derives in most cases from renegades and heretics who manipulate the techniques of rabbinical exegesis “to deceive and corrupt the dull-witted.”53 Such a derash sheldofi falsifies the truth, legality and spiritual message of the text and the principles of talmudic Judaism. “In a profound sense,” however, “the literary strategy of the converso is the opposite of what Rabbinic literature designates as minut — a term generally 53

Faur, “Don Quixote: Talmudist and mucho más” 143.

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translated ‘heresy.’”54 Instead of the minut operating like a morbid, sexual violation to infect the perplexed Jew with foreign and dangerous ideas, the literature of the insincere and often coerced to convert to Catholicism seeks to undermine the hostile culture in which the New Christian is forced to express him or herself, to gain satisfaction from ridiculing the imposed set of beliefs, to protect the converso’s remaining memories of prior understanding and history, and to act as a mnemonic through which further as yet unrecollected aspects of Judaism could be recovered and recreated. By ensuring that the mask worn — that of Christian piety and Spanish loyalty — is both convincing to the public observer who is likely to be a spy or other agent of the Inquisition and State and at the same time weak, deformed and ambiguous enough to remain unconvincing to those, like the wearer of the mask, are seeking signals of support from fellow Marranos, the converso can also construct beneath that illusion another face, that of the secret Jew. Nevertheless, Faur points out, and in so doing criticizes scholars like Leo Strauss and Shlomo Pines, that the doublemask always is in danger of confusing the wearer and reversing its vividness, its persuasive illusion.55 When we turn to Proverbs 25, then, we see that it begins with a statement about the ambiguous and counter-intuitive quality of concealment. 2.

To conceal a matter, this is the glory of God, to sift it thoroughly, the glory of kings. High though the heavens are, deep the earth, there is no fathoming the heart of kings.

There is an analogy between God and earthy kings, in that both are unfathomable to ordinary mortals because their ways are inscrutable: they deceive and trick for reasons of divine wisdom or state politics. However, the cunning of God is, as Maimonides discusses at length, a consequence of the need to work with human limitations, particularly men’s pre-alphabetic grasp of language, idolatrous clinging to myths and idols, and traumatic responses to historical events that throw them back to infantile levels of thought and feeling. The conniving of kings and other politicians is more machivellian and cynical, insofar as they try to defend themselves from attacks on their person, their authority, and their grasp on wealth and power. Even the best of kings, the proverb master cautions, cannot be fully trusted, and the good man or woman needs all the patience, cunning and luck possible to survive in the world. Granted that, the reader learns that God can see into the hearts and minds of these worldly rulers, and moreover He can manipulate their machinations to His own providential aims, so that history itself, if properly understood, reveals, not the intentions 54 55

Faur, “Don Quixote: Talmudist and mucho más” 144. Ibid, 144, n. 25.

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of these kings on earth, but the revealed intentions of providence. Reading those intentions out of the seemingly confused and deliberately obscured text of human affairs becomes, therefore, the mandated duty of the practicing Jew: to interpret the history of Israel in the world as the ahistorical presence of God. Midrashing, in other words, at once confirms the way in which God operates in the world and, at the same time, reveals the eternal truths and beauties of the Law — a Wisdom that preceded the creation of the world, provided the design for its emergence, and underlies its continuing existence. 5.

From silver remove the dross And it emerges wholly purified . . .

This kind of reading of Proverbs 25 does not yield allegory in a Platonic or Christian sense, no more so than it does as a kabbalistic unveiling of a theurgical universe open to human interference or direction. Such false readings, as we have indicated already, lead away from the moral and ethical verities of the Law and to the banalities, superstitions and idolatry of both the minim, the renegades from Judaism who seek to seduce their former co-religionists into joining them in the Church or the pseudo-Jews of mysticism and mythology who lead the unwitting astray down dizzying paths to confusion and despair — or sheer madness. 11.

Like apples of gold in a silver setting is a word that is aptly spoken. A silver ring, an ornament of finest gold, is a wise rebuke to an attentive ear.

Yet when there is a mazzuzah hidden in the Virgin’s foot or a deliberately mispronounced Latin word, such as Dio for Dios, in the recitation of an ecclesiastical credo, the illusion becomes more complicated, and in its complexity it revitalizes intellectual connections that work contrary to the outward sounds, images and gestures of the disguise. Faur explains: “the model for the converso literature is King Solomon’s ‘Golden apples in a silver mesh, this is a word spoken on its two circles.”56

56

Faur, “Don Quixote: Talmudist and mucho más” p. 145.

470

These disciplinas are the whips used by Penitentes to flagellate themselves and their brothers during the rituals of Holy Week. The shedding of blood is the distinctive feature of the Easter celebrations.

The matracas are noisemakers used on the evening before Easter Sunday during the ceremony that marks the transition from darkness to light. There is a debate on their relation to noisemakers used by Jews during Purim when the name of Haman is read from the Megillah.

The cross and the morada signal the Catholic identity of the Hermandad de Penitentes. What is hidden through distortion and absence is the Marrano history within the brotherhood

One brother makes the mark or seal of the Penitentes on the back of his fellow. It has been said that this sealing of the brotherhood by blood has been interpreted as a displaced circumcision rite for the Crypto-Jews of Latin America.

Secrecy in the Penitentes is all important, both for the main group of Hispanic Catholics and for the small group of Marranos. Whipping as a punishment for infractions of the community rules is also known among Jews, as happened in Amsterdam with Uriel da Costa.

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500

INDEX

INDEX

A

Anusim. See Anousim. Aquinas, St. Thomas 1, 161, 230, 231 Arbell, Mordechai 268–269 Archuleta, Ricardo 378, 380, 388 Archuleta, Ruben 182 Arendt, Hannah 189 Ari. See Luria, Isaac. Ariosto, Ludovico 125, 127, 130, 132–134, 136–139, 143, 415 Aristotle 135, 144, 219, 221, 230, 231, 237, 287, 294, 299, 301, 310, 313, 322, 336, 337 Armatoste 195 Armistad, Samuel G. 2 Aubier, Dominique 186 Auerbach, Erich 444 Ault, C. Thomas 127 Autism 400–401 Autopsia 333, 441, 446 Averroes (Ibn Rushd) 21, 161, 385, 324 Avicenna (Ibn Sina) 287 Avila, Theresa de. See Theresa de Avila. Ayala, Pedro Lopez de 201

Abravanel, Abraham 468 Abravanel, Benevenida 127 Abravanel, Samuel 126–127 Abreu, Jame 108 Accetto, Torquato 140, 142, 144 Aciman, André 425–426, 428 Acosta, Diego Pérez da 103 Al(f)onso de Cartagena, Don 156, 158– 159, 168, 169, 170 Alberro, Solange 252–253, 256 Alborayco 525 Aletheia 453 Alexandroni, Rabbi 314 Alexy, Trudi 295 Alfarabi 287 Alfasi, Isaac 321 Al-Harizi, Judag 247 Alivar Sanchez de Santa Maria 158 Allen, Woody 181 Al-Maghribi, Samuel ben Yahya ben 459– 461 Al-Wajiz al-Mughini 313–314 Analphabetic 392 Anamorphosis 36, 59–60, 130, 140, 144, 176, 366 Anous(im) 7, 9, 10, 15, 16, 18, 20, 24, 26, 95, 100, 123, 172, 207, 243, 245, 294, 320, 343, 357, 374, 397, 399, 410, 460, 466, 467

B Baal teshuva 8, 16 Baca, Randy 42 Bacon, Francis 375 Baglioli, Mario 147 Bakhtin, Mikhail 177 501

INDEX

Ballard (Guide) 45 Barker, Nicholas H. 221, 223, 224–225 Baroque 53, 124, 125, 130, 169, 176, 181, 185, 196, 216, 234, 237, 241, 274, 318, 331, 335, 337, 344, 349, 355, 360, 381, 392, 399, 404, 413, 433 Barrios, Miguel de 343, 355. See Levi, Daniel. Bataille, Georges 237 Batson, Robert N. 77, 85 Beasley, jr., Conger 3, 43, 44 Beatriz de Luna (Doña Gracia Nasi) 127 Beilis, Mendel 440 Bell, Dean Phillip 270 Ben Israel, Menasseh 127, 247 Benamozegh, Eli(jah) 129, 322, 467 Bernardini, Paolo 245–246, 263 Bernhart, Charlie 23 Black Legend 5, 235, 335, 348 Blair, Tony 28 Blood Purity, Statutes of 150, 158. See also Estates de sangre limpieza. Boca, Don Procopio 381 Bodian, Miriam 404 Böhm, Gűnter 260 Boiardo, Matteo Maria 125, 127, 130, 132, 139, 143 Borges, Jorge Luis 366 Boyajian, James C. 275 Boyd, E. 376 Brook, Andrée Aelion 126, 130 Bruno, Giordano 141 Buruma, Ian 27 Bush, George W. 19, 28 Bynehahthle 58

Carmelites 407 Carroll, Michael P. 128, 254 Cartagenas, Teresa de 110 Carvajal Family 71, 81–82, 103, 106, 110, 146, 155–157, 169, 195, 384, 391, 405 Carvajal, Francisca Núnez de 63 Carvajal, Gaspar de 51 Carvajal, Leonor de 384 Carvajal, Luis de, el Viejo 62, 104, 403, 405–407 Carvajal, Luis de, El Mozo 384, 404, 405, 406 Casás, César Ayala 171, 172, 173 Castelnuove, Rina 23 Castro, Américo 49, 159 Cavallo, Jo Ann 131, 139, 140, 143 Cavos, Berta 408 Cervantes, Miguel 133, 186, 380, 406, 414 Champ du Midrash 177, 367–368, 435, 440–441, 445, 452, 464–465 Chapman, Stanley D. 79 Chaucer, Geoffrey 294 Chaves, Manuel 382 Chesler, Phyllis 23, 38 Chodkiewicz, Michel 327 Cicero 158, 333 Cohen, Albert 402 Cohen, Judith R. 383 Cohen, Lasurent 327–228 Cole, Peter 378 Columbus, Christopher 19 Contraction/contrafaccion 59, 69, 435 Contraption 147, 154, 155, 196, 197, 199, 207, 434, 446 Conway, Jack 96 Corbin, Henri 366 Cordell, Linda 78 Coronado, Francisco Vásquez de 105 Cortes, Hernando 57 Costa, Trisrano da 124 Couliano, Ioan P. 231 Counter-contraption 193, 199, 266, 351 Crashaw, Richard 381 Crates 283 Crescas, Hasdai 238, 357

C Cabeza de Vaca 84 Cagots 65, 88 Calvin, John 19, 209 Camillo, Charles M. 31 Campo, Edwina da 352 Canetti, Elias 74, 135, 374 Carceres, Keobnor de 418 Cardoso, Isaac 203 502

INDEX

Cruz, Sor Juana de la. See Sor Juana. Cuellar, Gregory 408–410 Cunning 369 Cyncism 35, 140, 161, 162, 194, 200 239, 255, 282, 283, 288, 349, 409, 435, 398, 462, 469. See also kynikism. DaCosta, Uriel 326

El Mozo. See Carvajal, Luis de, the Younger. El Viejo. See Carvajal, Luis de, the Elder. Eliade, Mircea 14 Elliott, T.S. 464 Emmer, Piter 277 Enargaia 223, 229, 232, 331, 333, 389, 407–408, 416, 441, 464 Encantadas 69 Encanto 70, 73 Entrada 365 Epicurus 443, 458 Erasmus, Desiderius 20, 133, 209, 341 Escalona, Father Juan de 50 Estates de Sangre limpieza 8, 158 Evangelista, Alfredo 223 Evidentia 333, 389, 441. See enaergeia.

D Darame 223 Davidson, Clifford 215 De Certeau 33, 403–404, 406 DeCastro, Orobio. See Orobio. Del Hayo, Eugenio 63, 78, 398 Del Toro, Guillermo 366 Deliria/delirio/delerium 63, 184, 371, 402, 403, 406, 408. See delusions. Delusions 412, 414–415. See deleria. DeMauss, Lloyd 35, 348 DePaoli, Luigi 280 DeSanctis, Francesco 140 Desis 135 Deudo 201, 202 Diamond, James Arthur 289–294 Didi-Huberman, Georges 367 Diogenes 283 Discombobulation 78, 136, 197, 205 Dominguez, Orae 160, 161, 168 Dominicans 284 Doña Gracia Nasi. See Beatriz de Luna. Doña Gracia Nasi. See Nasi. Donadello, Claude 452 Donne, John 381 Dor-Shav, Ethan 141 Dreidle 32, 172 Drescher, Seymour 274–275 Dreyfus Affair 401, 440 Dubourg, Bernard 357, 367, 371, 452, 464–465 Duffy, Eamon 250

F Fajaro, Saavedra 146 Familiar(e)s 189, 347, 345 Faur, José 7, 11, 95, 135, 198, 199, 207, 284, 290, 297, 298, 299, 304, 306, 309, 319, 320–321, 323, 326, 339, 347, 359, 369, 392, 398, 406, 412, 432, 439, 440– 441, 444, 453, 456–456, 466–470 Feinberg, Larry J. 230–231 Fenn, Grace Serrano 102, 107, 109, 214 Fernando-Armesto, Felipe 245 Festival of Blood 52, 195, 215, 236, 374– 375. See fiesta de sangre. Fielding, Henry 274 Fiering, Norman 245, 263 Fiesta de sangre. See Festival of Blood. Fisher, William R. 378 Flagellant(e)s 44, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 65, 75, 80, 107, 110, 222–225, 227–228, 232, 235, 238, 332, 335, 338, 376, 393, 436 Fleischer, Ezra 302 Foucault, Michel 175 Francis of Assisi, Saint 52, 54, 55, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 88, 283, 330, 377, 378, 394 Franciscan, Friars 19, 44, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 79, 80, 84, 99, 128, 159, 189, 215, 222, 224, 228, 235, 241, 282, 283, 332, 335, 365, 377, 378, 381–382, 395, 454

E Efron, Noah J. 246 Eichmann, Adolf 189 Ekphrasis 229, 232, 233, 331, 334 503

INDEX

Frank, Jacob 128, 155 Frankel, Rachel 152, 159, 189, 272- 273 Freud, Sigmund 137, 178, 240, 250, 333, 373, 420 Friars. See Franciscan. Fulton, Margaret 401 Funkenstein, Amos 173, 328, 368–372

Griffith, D.W. 96 Grove, Richard 22 Guegen, Luc 367 Guerrero, R. Diaz 61 Guicciardini, Francesco 140 Guttiérez, Ramón 76

H G

Ha-Cohen 157. See Pablo de Santa Maria. Halbertal, Moshe 284, 310 Ha-Levi, Salomon/Shlomo 160. See Pablo de Santa Maria. Halevy, Schulamit C. 17, 18, 100 Halloway, Julia Bolton 99–100 Hames, Harvey 299, 303, 305 Handelman, Susan A. 358, 360, 367 Harris, William 282 Hashgasha 265 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 27, 75, 245, 369, 371–372 Heller-Roazen, David 182 Herbert, George 381 Hernández, Maria Theresa 402–403, 406 Herz, Cary 431 Hillel, House of 144 Holy Office. See Inquisition. Homer 115, 237, 337 Hordes, Stanley 22, 66–67, 91, 210, 391, 397–399 Hosking, Charles 301 Howard, John 28 Huli, Yokoub 90

Galileo Galilei 134, 147 Galut 114–115 Galut 70, 112, 80, 192, 319, 352, 455, 457, 460 Gaonic 21, 152, 209, 300, 304, 306, 311, 409, 441–445, 457. See Saadya Gaon. Garcia y Morales, Baltasar 64 Garcia, John 104 Garcia, Lucas 103 Garriguas, John D. 269 Gauchapines 78 Genezaros 65, 78–79 Gershon, Levi ben. See Gersonides. Gersonides (Levi ben Gershon) 287 Giametti, A. Bartlett 131 Gibson, Mel 19, 281 Gilman, Stephen 252–253, 256 Gilson, Etienne 374, 460–461 Ginzburg,. Carlo 333, 369, 372, 404, 441, 463 Girard, René 230, 353 Gitlitz, David 356 Gnosticism 301 Gois, Demão de 364 Golden, Gloria 81, 83, 100, 102, 103, 105, 117, 119, 121, 391 Goldwert, Marvin 60–62 Gombrich, Ernst 143 Gómez,, Antonio Enrique 74, 339, 340, 344–345, 349, 355–356, 358, 359–360 Gonzalo Garcia de Santa Maria 159 Gordon, Nada 176, 178 Gorenstein, Lina 361–362 Gorski, Philip 283 Gracian 128 Graizbord, David L. 358

I Ibn Ezra, Moses 297 Ibn Gabirol 348 Ibn Hatib, Jacob 457 Ibn Paquda, Bahye 297 Ibn Rushd. See Averroes. Ibn Sina. See Avicenna. Ibn Varga, Solomon 462–463 Incidentalism 5, 22–24, 28, 98, 139, 197 Inquisition 5, 10, 67, 80, 94, 99, 104, 105, 111, 118, 137, 150, 154, 169, 170, 143, 171, 173, 174, 175–176, 179, 182–192, 504

INDEX

193, 95, 196, 199, 200, 208–211, 214, 226, 229, 239, 243, 248–249, 253, 260, 263–265, 303, 324, 325, 326, 342, 344, 347–348, 350, 354–355, 364, 383–384, 391, 395, 404–407, 410–411, 416, 418, 419, 422–423, 434, 435, 444–450 Irizarry, Estelle 427 Israel, Jonathan I. 212 Israel, Menasseh ben. See Ben Israel, Menasseh. Iurodstvo 283 Izay. Jo Roybel 108, 400

Krieger, Murray 336–338 Kunin, Seth D. 202, 397 Kynikism. See cynicism.

L Lamadrid, Enrique R. 80 Lamy, Jean-Baptiste 88–89, 108–109, 110, 120, 121, 122, 450 Larrea, Arcadio 380 Lavender, Abraham D. 91, 391 Le Merguer, Sandrick 465 León, Luis de 94 Lerraldo, Carlos 408–410 Leskov, Nikolai 283 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 229, 233, 237, 334, 336, 337 Levi, Daniel 242 (alias Miguel de Barrios) Levi, Iakov 240, 374 Leviathan 174 Levinas, Emmanuel 323, 412 Levi-Strauss, Claude 203 Lewis, Bernard 25 Liebman, Seymour B. 410 Limpieza de sangre 66, 324, 391. See Estates de sangre limpieza. Livy (Titus Livius) 143 Lollini, Fabrizio 463 Longaria, Woodrow Eugene 81–83 Lopez, Mari 351 Lucretius 454 Ludibrium 196, 198, 200, 201, 232, 236, 331, 336 Luis de Carvajal, Friar 159 Lumley, Brian 44 Lummis, Charles 43, 44, 80 Luria, Isaac (Ari) 352, 412, 414 Lusitanus, Amatus 127 Luteranismo 20. See Lutheranism. Lutheranism 183, 209. See Luteranismo.

J Jesuits 284, 363, 390, 394 Job 141, 174 John of the Cross, Saint 406–407 Johnson, Frances 413–414 Josephus, Flavius 441, 456, 466 Juan de Dios. See John of the Cross. Judaizantes 9, 16, 20, 26, 27, 28, 37, 44, 84, 85–86, 92, 111, 118, 128, 183, 184, 187–191, 210, 227, 253, 257, 264, 284, 364, 342, 355, 384, 391, 404, 423, 445, 446 Jumano 49

K Kabbalah 11, 75, 177, 187, 193, 199, 206, 288, 296, 297–299, 301, 303–304, 306, 309, 310, 316–317, 321–323, 324, 328, 352, 364, 386, 398, 412, 414, 468 Kafka, Franz 263, 344, 451 Kairos 61, 75 Kalman, Naáma 415 Kaplan, Yosef 165, 169, 202 Karasick, Adeena 176–179 Katz, Dana 130 Katz, David S. 247 Kavadi 216–218 Kett, Irving 170 Kimhi. See Qimhi, David. Klooster, Wim 271 Kobrin, Nancy Hartvelt 400–401 Krieger, Judith Gale 162, 167, 237

M Mabry, Thomas J. 97 Machiavelli, Niccolo 137, 239, 285, 288, 469 Magid, Shaul 77 505

INDEX

Maimonidean Controversy and Debates 21, 148–152, 161, 187, 193, 200, 209– 210, 301–305, 307, 320–321, 323–324, 352, 398, 458 Maimonides, David 327 Maimonides. See Rambam. Maisondieu, Jean 354 Malamud, Bernard 201 Maldonado, Juan de 111 Mâle, Emile 444 Malsines 179, 189, 342, 345, 347, 358, 418 Mancha, la 21, 117, 391, 397, 436 Manrique, Gómez 168 Margalit, Avishar 27 Martinez, Antonio José 89 Martinez, Robert Luis 146, 155 Marzagalli, Silvia 266–268 McGaha, Michael D. 212 McVeigh, Timothy 247 Méchoulan, Henri 357 Melungeons 79 Mendez, Maria Agueda 163 Mergui, Marcel 357, 367, 435, 445, 452, 465 Mētis 142, 369–370, 372, 392 Michelangelo 130, 156 Midrashing 199, 206, 289, 293, 360, 366, 357, 367, 370, 372, 375, 409, 435, 445, 450–452, 458–459, 461, 464, 468 Mills, George 22 Mimesis 233, 334 Montoya, Luis 378 Morasha 302, 352, 463 Morselli, Marco 239 Moses/Moshe de Leon 3–4, 406 Muñiz-Huberman, Angelina 170

Nasi, Doña Gracia 174 Nathan of Gaza 127 Neoplatonism. See Plato Netanyahu, Benzion 161, 162, 164, 168, 355, 439 Neulander, Judith 22, 173, 396–397 Neusner, Jacob 290, 299, 315–319, 396, 440, 456, 458, 467 Nicolai, Friedrich 336–337 Nietzsche, Friedrich 237 Nieves, Luis López 427 Niewöhner, Friedrich 457, 459–462 Novinsky, Anita 261–263, 361–364

O Occidentalism 26, 27 Oicotype 454 Olmos, Jacinto de 117 Olviera, Luciano 203, 330 Oñate-Cudido, Don Juan de 44, 48, 49, 50, 52, 62. 66–67, 71, 110 Orientalism 16, 19, 24, 25, 173, 254, 255 Orobio de Castro, Isaac 164, 165 Ortega, Felipe. 101 Osorio, Alberto Osorio. 434

P Pablo de Santa Maria 155, 157, 162, 163, 164–65, 167–168, 170 Pablo Garcia de Santa Maria 156 Pacheco, Filberto 103 Padilla, Vincente 378 Parea, Juan de 103 Parra, Antonio de 106 Parra, Henry 105–106 Paul of Burgos. See Pablo de Santa Maria. Paulo de Santa Maria. See Pablo de Santa Maria. Pedro de Cartagena 159 Pena, Abe 381–382 Perlmutter, Dawn 230, 237 Pezevenk 426 Phantasia 232, 234, 331, 335 Phantasmata 219, 222, 230–231 Philo Judeus 313, 441, 456

N nação. See Naçio. Nachmanides. See Ramban. Naçio, el: nação 196, 271–272, 325, 363 Nader, Helen 147148, 151–153, 155, 166, 168, 201 Nahon, Gérard 266 Narddon, Walder 333 506

INDEX

Pieroni, Geraldo 263–265 Pijning, Ernst 276 Pilpul(ism) 11, 24. 173, 293, 297 Pines, Shlomo 219, 469 Plato 73, 116, 230, 231, 237, 291, 299–300, 301, 302, 322, 324, 328, 336, 374, 375, 453, 470 Pliny 360 Poincaré, Henri 375 Polillios 179, 342 Polston, Cody 388 Prescott, William F. 156–157 Prince, L. Bradford 55, 88 Proust, Marcel 343, 373 Pythagoras 300

Rivkin, Ellis 355 Rococo 234, 335 Roland, Robert 248–249 Romm, James 246 Rosenthal, Pinchas 198 Rotenberg, Mordechai 245 Roth, Cecil 35, 239

S S(h)abbatai Tzvi 155, 211 Saadya (Se’adya) Gaon 206, 297, 411 Sabbateanism 20, 326, 328, 352, 412, 414 Sabbutucci, Dario 222 Saez, Lilian 94 Said, Edward 24, 25, 27, 28, 44, 254 Samora, Julian 87, 89 San Francisco, Jacinta de 55 Sánchez, Amelia 122 Sanchez, Dell F. 71 Sanchez, Jane C. 76 Santa Maria Family 146, 155, 157, 169 Santo Officio. See Inquisition. Sarna, Jonathan D. 277 Saunders, Charles Francis 44, 45, 46 Schmader, Matthew 78 Schmidt, Benjamin 247 Scholem, Gershom 114–115 Schulweis, Harold M. 287 Schurz, William L. 60 Se’adya. See Saadya Gaon. Seed, Patricia 246 Seidespinner-Núñez, Dayle 159 Seneca 158 Septimus, Bernard 287, 300 Serrano, Jose Muro 108 Shabbatai Tzvi 127, 302, 457 Shabbatianism. See Sabbateanism. Shasha, David 296, 298, 322, 325, 328, 349, 366 Shimai, House of 144 Silveira, Miguel D. 380 Simmons, Marc 49, 69 Simon, Patricia Vandel 87, 89 Sirâj al-Úqûl 313 Sittra acha 114

Q Qabbala. See Kabbalah. Qimhi, David 193, 291 Quintillian 333

R Rambam (Maimonides) 11, 15, 20, 92, 129, 137, 148, 151, 169, 172, 194, 205, 206, 232, 278, 288, 289, 290, 291–294, 295–301, 307–308, 310–314, 316, 321– 323, 327, 350, 370–371, 374–375, 396, 398, 407, 409, 411, 441, 451, 457, 459, 460, 463 Ramban (Nachmanides) 11, 21, 92, 137, 149, 151, 172, 285, 287, 288, 295–296, 300–301, 304, 307–308, 311–312, 315– 316, 321–322, 398, 407, 409, 411, 451 Ramírez, David 94–95, 185, 287, 380–381, 396, 445, 466 Rashi. (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhawki) 297 Rawidowicz, Simon 289–290 Real, Teodoro 123 Reinach, Salomon 27 Reinberg, Virginia 228 Rétroversion 452 Révah, Israel S. 118, 255, 340, 342, 343– 344, 346–351, 352–353, 355–356, 358– 359, 398 Rivero, Mauricio 368 507

INDEX

Tselem 114–115, 293 Twersky, Isidore 29

Sobremonte, Tomas Trevino de 70 Socrates 73, 113, 115, 282 Soltes, Ori Z. 431 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 4, 155, 157 Sosa, Gaspar de 82–83 Sosa, Lucas Rodriguez Costaño de 104 Soucher, Abraham P. 371 Spinoza, Bernard (Baruch) 326 Sri Thenday 219 Stark, Richard B. 376–379, 382 Statutes of Blood Purity 208, 319, 349, 412, 444, 446, 458 Steele, Thomas J. 75, 365 Stone, Laurence 463 Strauss, Leo 289, 469 Sulzburger, jr, Arthur Ochs 24 Superstitio 162, 207, 376 Sutton, Silvia Hamui 382–383

U Uchmany, Eva Alexandra 71, 74, 226, 256–259, 398, 406 Ulloa, Alfonso de 415 Unamuno, Miguel de 281 Uncanny 5, 333, 396, 401 Unheimlich. See Uncanny. Usque, Samuel 126–127, 174, 175, 249

V Vaez, Gonzalo 383 Valdes, N. 22 Valdéz, Richard 85, 86–87, 396 Vaneigem, Raoul 465–466 Vargas, Diego de 85, 396 Vera, Lope de 360 Vico, Giambattista 142, 369, 370–371, 375 Victoria, Diego Hernández 111 Vidas, Albert da 126 Viereia, Antonio 363 Vigil, Juan Montes 117 Vigil, Maurillo 117–121 Virgil 388

T T(h)eresa de Avila, Saint 154, 157, 406– 407 Tasso, Torquato 125, 127, 130, 132, 135, 137–139, 143 Taylor, Carl 97–98 Tergiversation 427 Thaipusam 216, 219, 220, 225, 238 Theologoumenon 464 Thomism. See Aquinas, St. Thomas. Tokkun: tikkun ha-goof 204–205 tikkun ha-nefesh 116, 204–205 tikkun ha-olam 115, 204–205, 328 tikkun ha-shem 204–205 tikkun ha-toladot 206 Tinieblas 7, 9, 113, 381, 393 Tosafists 297, 299 Toynbee, Arnold B. 245 Trent, Council of 52, 139, 216, 220, 234– 235, 241, 325, 335, 392, 394, 399, 412– 413, 449, 456, 464 Tridentine. See Trent, Council of. Trigano, Shmuel 113, 114, 116, 295, 356, 398 Trujillo, Modesto 97

W Wachtel, Nathan 26, 250–251, 254–255, 263, 416–424 Wales, Robert Ellis 96 Wallis, Michel 100 Ward, Michael K. 75–76 Waters, Frank 62, 84 Webster, Susan Verdi 56, 227 Weigle, Marta 97, 375 Wilke, Carsten L. 256, 340, 342, 343–344, 347–348, 351–352 Williams, James Homer 271 Wilson, Fred E. 97 Wroth, William 14, 215

X Ximenéz, A. 353 508

INDEX

Y

Zekhut 315–317, 319 Zerati, Don Fernando. See Gómez. Zeugma 252 Zevda, Rav Abar bar 204 Zialcita, Fernando 223 Zimler, Richard 204 Zimmer, Piter 276 Zinc, Anne 266

Yates, Frances Amelia 231 Yocum, Daniel 284

Z Zagdanski, Stéphane 386 Zatti, S. 125, 131, 132–134, 137–140, 143, 144

509