Book Review: Conversos Between Judaism and Christianity
David Shasha
Book Review: Conversos Between Judaism and Christianity
Manuel da Costa Fontes, The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain, Purdue University Press, 2005
In his classic study In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (1992) Jose Faur provides an analysis of the different types of Converso; those Jews who converted to Christianity under the malign pressures of the Spanish Inquisition. In one of these “typologies” Faur presents the Converso who found himself spiritually alienated from the world he lived in; a person who had lost all sense of parochial identity and who often stood at the very precipice of nihilism and contempt for society.
Describing the author of La Lozana Andaluza Francisco Delicado (Delgado) Faur states:
This converso was an antihero: despised by all other conversos, ruthlessly attacked by religious authorities, unkindly treated by both Christian and contemporary Jewish historians. And yet – regardless of the merits of his choice – he alone had the courage to refuse to play by the conventionalisms of a corrupt and oppressive system. He was convinced that within the spiritual vacuum of Christian Spain and Portugal, religion and ethics were inoperative; hence, he negated both immortality and morality. (p. 52)
Faur’s analysis is heir to the provocative writings of the iconoclastic Spanish historian Americo Castro whose classic Espana en su Historia (1948) (published in English in 1954 as The Structure of Spanish History and currently out of print) remains deeply contested in the study of Hispanic identity and history.
Castro famously found the Semitic influence on Spanish civilization to be decisive. In his many writings he reinforces the idea that Spain was built upon the foundations not only of Latinate Europe, Catholic to its core, but also on the polyglot humanistic civilization of Muslim Spain. The emergence of an oppressive Inquisition progressively forces this humanistic culture underground and its Jewish and Muslim practitioners into very difficult positions to say the least.
Castro looks at the new Spanish convert as an insurgent figure who struggled to keep the old ways of Judaism and Islam while pretending to be a “good” Catholic:
The Spanish convert of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries expressed himself in somber modes because circumstances drove him back to the deepest roots of his own existence. It is no surprise that the Jew should have expressed himself thus but it is surprising that Spanish Christianity should have taken on a darker and darker color until it reached the point of a negation of the world very close to nihilism such as we would seek in vain in France or Italy. And what is most striking in Spain is that writers from the laity like Mateo Aleman, Quevedo, Gracian, and many others, should display such a downcast manner without giving rise to the supposition that they were all necessarily Jews. Just as literary prose and lyric poetry, once they were created, were available to everyone, likewise the desperate style of the Judaic tradition became a possible form of expression for many Old Christians. (pp. 567-568)
Castro’s trenchant and learned analysis remains a much-debated and contested way of seeing the emergence of what we now call Golden Age Spanish literature.
As we have learned, the development of the picaresque Spanish novel, most famously in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, was closely informed by older forms of Hispano-Arabic literature such as the rhymed narrative style of the maqama which had first developed the literary form of the picaro. In fact, Cervantes himself makes this more than clear when in the course of his groundbreaking work he attributes the story of the Don to a manuscript that he found in the marketplace by one Cide (Arabic, sayyid) Hamete Benengeli:
With this idea I pressed him to read the beginning, and when he did so, making an extempore translation from the Arabic into Castilian, he said that the heading was: History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benegeli, Arabic historian. I needed great caution to conceal the joy I felt when the title of this book reached my ears. Running to the silk merchant, I bought all the lads parchments and papers for half a real, but if he had any sense and known how much I wanted them, he might very well have demanded and got more than six reals from the sale. I then went off with the Moor into the cloister of the cathedral, and asked him to translate for me into Castilian everything in those books that dealt with Don Quixote, adding nothing and omitting nothing; and I offered to pay him whatever he asked. (Penguin Edition, p. 77)
Cervantes reminds us that Spanish civilization was built on the ruins of the vanquished Semitic peoples who were, after the Reconquista, forced to acculturate, often under pain of torture, to the Catholicism of the victors.
These Ibero-Semitic currents become life and death issues once the Inquisition takes its lethal form. Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity faced a number of different options, as Faur correctly points out. Jews could refuse to convert and face death; they could convert and discard their Jewish identity and past; they could convert and pretend to be Christian while remained Jews in secret; or they could reject all forms of religious faith while continuing to pretend that they were upstanding Christians.
In the work of Castro’s prized student, the Harvard professor Stephen Gilman, we read an epic exposition of this new society. Most prominently in his classic book The Spain of Fernando de Rojas: The Intellectual and Social Landscape of La Celestina (1972, currently out of print), Gilman explores the social world of a text that forms a crucial nexus in the development of the Spanish Golden Age. La Celestina is a work that was quite well-known for many centuries in the Hispanic world and was generally seen as a good-natured, ribald and bawdy comedy of manners that played an important role in the evolution of the European theater.
But Gilman, in the footsteps of Castro, sees the matter in quite different terms. Focusing on the Converso identity of De Rojas, Gilman sees the play as a provocation to normative Spanish identity as filtered through our understanding of the Inquisition and its brutalities. Gilman reconstructs in painstaking detail the biography of the author and determines that the play is shot through with the thoughts and feelings of the Conversos in ways that represent a radically new way of seeing things. Rather than maintaining a crypto-Jewish formalism, De Rojas lashes out at Christianity using the signs and symbols of a Judaism that he no longer believes in:
However much Rojas may have admired the style of the[se] prayers or sympathized with his fellows crying out, like Pleberio, from the depths of “hac lachrymarum valle” [Hebrew, emeq ha-bakha, English, vale of tears], he could not share their exaltation. Harried by brute force, carefully administered hatred, he apparently felt, as did those Jewish heretics attacked by Maimonides, that God had “abandoned the world.” As we shall see, the sense of hopelessness is so strong that a French translator felt compelled to add a new character whose role it was to console the stricken father with a set of commonplaces which Rojas had refused to intone: those which explain why God permits evil to exist and how grateful we should be that He does. (p. 199)
It is in this context that we must read the important new study by Kent State professor Manuel da Costa Fontes The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain which treats De Rojas’ La Celestina as well as Delicado’s La Lozana Andaluza in a similar vein.
For those of us who have read and absorbed the brilliant ideas of Jose Faur in his In the Shadow of History, Fontes’ book is a major piece of scholarship that provides much detail that compliments Faur’s original thesis. Fontes carefully looks at the two literary works in great detail laying out a plethora of evidence that these books were written as coded attacks on the Church and on Spanish society in general.
In order to approach this type of allegorical reading of Medieval texts, we must first understand the current orthodoxies in literary study and the many complications that necessarily arise when conducting a style of analysis that insists on the intentions of the author and which make stringent demands of the readers of these texts.
Ever since the famous pronouncement of Jacques Derrida, “il n’y a pas de hors texte” – There is nothing outside of the text, students of literature are focused in an almost robotically mechanical way on the formal processes of literature to the exclusion of historical context. Famously, Roland Barthes proclaimed the “death of the author” which intensified this acontextuality and made it seem as if the literary work was something strictly beyond the control of its creator.
It must be clearly understood that medieval texts dependent upon allegorical interpretation continually evade and reject such a Post-Modern understanding.
Bringing back to mind the ideas of Leo Strauss in his classic Persecution and the Art of Writing, we must allow the medieval author their license to transgress under cover of normative representations. As Strauss states:
Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. That literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only. It has all the advantages of private communication without having its greatest disadvantage – that it reaches only the writer’s acquaintances. It has all the advantages of public communication without having its greatest disadvantage – capital punishment for the author. (p. 25)
It is this very passage that Fontes turns to on the last page of his study, but it is a theme that he has been tracking throughout the book:
Besides worrying about discrimination and the Inquisition, disaffected converso writers eventually had to be concerned about official censorship as well. It came about at the beginning of the sixteenth century, because of the centralization of state and church power, the religious conflicts that arose with Protestantism, and the invention of the printing press, which permitted dissidents to disseminate their ideas much more quickly and efficiently than before. (p. 69)
Here we see that there were existential concerns that informed the writing of texts like La Celestina and La Lozana Andaluza which must be factored into any legitimately coherent reading of the works that seeks to make sense of the various complexities of the semiotics of the texts.
The problem that we face today is the erosion of this culture and the hermeneutical codes in which it manifested itself. A purely formalist reading reinforces the standard Hispanic approach that supports a Eurocentric reading of the texts. Such a reading unfortunately ignores the layers of encoding that form the textual substrate of the writings.
In order to truly understand these works, their most intimate details must be “translated” from the coded vernaculars of the Converso culture. This Converso culture is best understood as being encoded, as Strauss indicates in his Persecution and the Art of Writing, in order to protect the intended reader of the text, the “insider,” from the possible depredations of the “outsider.” The proper decoding will then yield the “hidden” meaning that is secretively being kept from clear sight by writers who continued to remain in mortal peril from the harsh depredations of the Inquisition.
The reader is thus presented with a hermetic text that is pumped up with many signs and symbols that are left as they are, but which yield a “correct” reading when unpacked according to the intentions of the author. Such a thing provides us with a potential hermeneutics of Converso identity, but only if we accept the literary modalities of the culture in which the texts were produced. We as readers are asked to see “through” the signs that coat the text and remove their normative kernel to find the transgressive kernel underneath.
Fontes provides us with a representative reading in his study. In a discussion of De Rojas’ rhetorical troping of the tradition of the “Blessed Mother” he finds that La Celestina seeks to use the topos of the Whorehouse, Celestina the procuress’ place of business, to do some extremely anti-Christian things, things that are deeply offensive to an orthodox sensibility:
For Christians, the very thought of equating a woman like Celestina with the Virgin Mary is extremely disquieting, to say the least. The immediate reaction of many Catholic readers to whom the idea occurs is to banish it completely from their minds in order to eliminate the guilt felt for having had it in the first place, as if the sacrilegious notion were originally theirs. (p. 109)
The means of laying out this interpretation is a close reading of passages and images scattered in an arranged pattern throughout the work that forms the template by which Fontes produces his many analyses in the book:
Like Celestina in her community, the Virgin was regarded as Mother by all Catholics. Her litany, which Fernando de Rojas must have heard many times in church, hailed her as “Mater castissima” (“Mother most chaste”), and “Mater inviolate” (“Mother inviolate”). Being a whore and procuress, Celestina is an antithesis of all these qualities. Sempronio’s “madre bendita” means precisely “blessed mother,” and Calisto’s designation of the old bawd as “reina y senora mia” (“my queen and lady”) also parallels the litany, where Mary is hailed several times as queen, including “Regina Virginum” (“Queen of Virgins”), i.e., queen of the very virgins that Celestina, whose reign consists of lechery and prostitution, labors to undo. (pp. 110-111)
Though considered a classic of Spanish literature, La Celestina will be a very unfamiliar work to Western readers today. It has been enshrined in Hispanic civilization as a classic which means that Fernando de Rojas succeeded in his literary swindle way beyond his wildest dreams. The play as a normative text provides readers with a comfort zone that analyses like those of Faur, Castro, Gilman and now Fontes come to undo.
Such work of literary deconstruction does not, as we have seen, mean that we are permitted to isolate the literary document and ignore authorial intent or historical context, but on the contrary insists that we look even more carefully at the reconstruction of the historical and cultural context to the point where we seek to strip off the surface patina of the text and recalibrate its purported intent in formal terms, an intent that has been reinforced by centuries of positive reception in Hispanic civilization, and find behind the veneer of the normative a pulsating beehive of anarchy and passionate concern for things that the normative culture would never in good faith accept or acquiesce to.
Thus, a writer like Fernando de Rojas intentionally composed his work with the idea that he was fooling the “outsider” reader while encoding a message for the “insider” Converso reader.
The history of the Conversos has been limited to the two main types of the believing Christian and the crypto-Jew. The scholar Ben Zion Netanyahu has been at the forefront of the school which insists that the Conversos were good Christians and that all this business of crypto-Judaism is a sham. Other scholars like David Gitlitz maintain that the extent of crypto-Judaism is truly vast and far-reaching.
What is generally missing from these conflicting analyses is the point that we find in Faur emanating from Castro and Gilman and now restated by Fontes. In these pioneering works which add multiple layers of complexity to our understanding of Spanish identity in the Middle Ages and early Modernity – an important factor in assessing the Renaissance and the Enlightenment – we see the encoded messages that bespeak a radical interpretation of religion and society that were, as Faur points out, central to the emergence of what we now think of as Modern culture.
As we have said, students who study these texts are provided interpretations that generally serve to reinforce the status quo rather than piecing together the old culture that existed in Spain’s Golden Age. Jews and Muslims are generally given little attention and the matter of religious parody and critique is seen in a larger context of comedic writing that serves to sever the encoding process from the literary hermeneutics of the texts.
What is so strange about all of this is that even without the complex deciphering process that is undertaken by Fontes in The Art of Subversion that painstakingly matches each theme and symbol used in these works of literature, the works themselves are deeply strange to the Modern reader. When disentangled from the orthodoxy of much Hispanic scholarship which aims to maintain the normative status of the texts, Le Celestina and La Lozana Andaluza among other Converso-penned works, betray some very troubling and disconcerting thematic concerns.
La Lozana Andaluza is a work about a Spanish girl who gets entangled in some romantic matters that force her to leave Spain and go to Italy where she throws off all sexual chains and becomes a prostitute. As was the case in the Celestina, the presence of sexual deviants and religious hypocrites is something that does not need to be decoded at all – it is at the very surface of the texts and at the very heart of their frank anti-clerical thematic. The amazing thing is the resistance to the Semitic analysis with its deeply anti-Christian overtones by many scholars.
Just a cursory look at the plotlines of these texts will show some very disconcerting patterns of behavior that would appear to clearly validate the approach of looking at the works in a Judaic frame: Celestina as we have said is a pimp and during the course of the play we see priests, nuns and everyday “believers” living in a world that would in no sense be marked as one of holiness and sanctity. It is a brutal and bestial world of cruel and immoral people who use and abuse one another.
In the case of La Lozana Andaluza we have the same thing: Whores abound while the text displays erect penises and presents discussions of syphilis without any hesitation. In no uncertain terms, these are texts that are not pious works of devotion such as the treatises of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, another pair from Converso stock whose pieties represented a very different way of appropriating the old Semitic spirituality than the nihilistic and pornographic screeds of Rojas and Delicado.
Fontes does an excellent job in his book to provide a succinct review of Converso history in order to set the table for his literary study of the works. In addition, he provides capsule biographies of the two authors and summaries of the two books that serve the initiate reader well. While Castro and particularly Gilman provide expertly detailed histories and biographies of these Converso figures, Fontes does a great service by condensing a great deal of information into his book which enables those who have not studied the subject in detail to easily grasp the background needed to appreciate and understand these difficult and, for the anglophone reader, relatively obscure literary works.
And then there is the matter for Sephardim of the pioneering studies of Jose Faur and the way in which Fontes’ work beautifully complements those studies. One of the most striking things about The Art of Subversion is how it forms a piece with the work of Faur. Not simply restating Faur’s main theses, Fontes goes a step beyond Faur by providing a plethora of detail that more than confirms the validity of Faur’s readings of these Converso texts. In particular, I was deeply impressed by the wealth of information on Christian ritual and liturgy that serves the reader as a primary resource when attempting to decode the opaque symbols and language of these works. Fontes brilliantly captures not only the historical and biographical contexts of these literary works, but burrows into the text quite deeply to unpack most of the major features of the texts’ allegorical symbolism, as we see in the following representative passage:
Lozana does not really believe in a three-doored, Trinitarian Christian heaven, for she doubts anyone will ever reach such a place. The very idea of a Christian paradise is utterly meaningless to her. Consequently, the peace that she might encounter is a nonexistent heaven that she is not about to seek is no more real than that heaven. Should she find it, however, just in case, she will send it to Rampin, tied with a Solomonic knot. This enigmatic, cross-shaped knot, which also appears in an engraving, seems to constitute a challenge in itself. What could it possibly mean? It may not be unreasonable to surmise that Delicado names the knot after King Solomon in order to point to the Old Testament, thus providing his reader with another key. Anyone who wishes to know what he is really up to must understand his book, the meaning of which cannot be deciphered through a quick, superficial reading, as if untying a Gordian knot with a gentile sword, by brute force, but with the intellect suggested by the ironically cross-shaped knot named after a Jewish, Old Testament monarch whose wisdom had become proverbial. (p. 225)
It must be remembered that De Rojas and Delicado were not people lighting candles in basements; De Rojas was a respected lawyer and Delicado a priest who was forced to flee Spain under murky circumstances having to do with the Inquisition which possibly though we should keep in mind the mystery of his own syphilitic condition. What must be understood is that these were men who did not return formally to Judaism, but continued to live as Catholics. Their insults to the faith and to their fellow Catholics therefore represent what we would see as a deeply eccentric modality that chose neither side of the normative equation.
Being neither Jew nor Christian in their complex mental state, men like De Rojas and Delicado sought, as Fontes spells out in his book’s title, the art of “subversion”; a cynical and dangerous mechanism that hid its true motivations under the cover comedy and satire.
Their works are necessary correctives to a view that teaches only Judaism or Christianity in dealing with Conversos. Their “beliefs,” if that is what such nihilistic critiques can accurately be called, are larded with disillusionment, fear, anxiety, loathing and gallows’ humor. Texts such as Le Celestina and La Lozana Andaluza and others such as Lazarillo de Tormes, the Libro de Buen Amor, Guzman de Alfarache and the religious writings of Luis de Leon, John of the Cross and Teresa, must all be read as part of the complex multiplicity of the Converso identity. All of these writers are cognizant and deeply affected by the mechanisms of anti-Jewish suppression and persecution in Spain and the Inquisition is never far from their minds – no matter how far away they pretended to be in their waking lives.
Current pedagogy has sequestered these Converso writings into a Hispanic ghetto where they are dealt with by scholars and students who have generally ignored the Jewish component of the works. Brilliant scholars like Manuel da Costa Fontes have dared to challenge the sleepy orthodoxies of this field in a similar manner to the way in which Maria Rosa Menocal has done in the context of the polemics involving Arabic influence in Spanish culture. By and large, the great insights of Jose Faur have been limited to debates among Jewish scholars and seem to be of little concern to the field of Spanish literary studies which continues to ignore what seems to be obvious to anyone with their eyes open.
It would appear that a segregation of the two fields – Jewish and Hispanic studies – once so magnificently alive in the studies of Castro, Cecil Roth and the Sephardi genius Mair Jose Benardete – serves the current constituencies of the two communities. Jewish scholars, primarily of Ashkenazi extraction, look to the Sephardic experience as another piece in the history of a perpetual anti-Semitism rather than as part of a much larger context of Jewish acculturation in the Diaspora. Hispanic scholars are happy to oblige this benighted and jaundiced perspective which permits them to continue to maintain a cordon sanitaire around their culture and ironically reinforce an academic limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, which keeps the Spanish civilization in Europe and out of the Middle East. Such Eurocentrism is affirmed by the Ashkenazim and the Hispanics whose aim is to keep Sephardim and Converso culture outside the bounds of the normative discourse.
We must therefore applaud The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain and its author Manuel da Costa Fontes for the contribution it makes to Sephardic studies, but, more importantly, for the way it confirms and affirms the intimate and inseparable links between Jewish and Hispanic culture. It is a work that should become a staple in our studies of Sephardic civilization and one that re-establishes the grand tradition of the great scholars of this culture.
The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain is a book that is mandatory reading for students of Sephardic culture. It clearly presents the deep and manifold complexities inherent in the Converso culture and the ways in which that culture expresses the plural realities and concerns of the Jewish people who lived in Spain at a time of great upheaval and calamity. Its readings of the works of Fernando de Rojas and Francisco Delicado, works that are now not very well-known to the ordinary reader, restore those writings as primary documents in Jewish and Western history enabling the student of history to better comprehend both the contradictions and the development within Western civilization and the ways in which Jews participated in the larger culture using their own codes and symbols.
Discussing the fate of the Sephardim in our time Mair Jose Benardete emotionally states in his masterwork Hispanic Culture and Character of the Sephardic Jews:
Franco’s Spain saved from annihilation several hundred Sephardis from Hitler’s madmen. This is an illustration of how Spain has shown her benevolence. From causes arising out of other situations, almost one hundred thousand Sephardim are scattered throughout Iberic-America. If nowhere else, it will be in this newest of Spain where the medieval Sephardic Jew, through a rejuvenation of his language, will be equipped with a civilized medium of expression and through it heed the whisperings and voice of the Spirit. (p. 186)
It is this spirit that is resurrected in the powerful study of Manuel da Costa Fontes for which we must all be tremendously appreciative as it restores to us important parts of that ancient language of the Sephardim and corrects the literary record and opens the field up to new studies based on its trenchant premises.
David Shasha
From SHU 254, March 28, 2007