Were God's People Destined to be Ruled by a Mortal King? A Judeo-Converso- Christian Tradition (original) (raw)
Studies in Honour of Ora Limor, 2014
I n an ongoing effort to de-essentialize identity, current historiography is insisting on hybridism as a major means to understanding Iberian converso idiosyncrasies. This recent shift has contributed to a re-evaluation of fervent Christians of converso origin, like Alonso de Cartagena, Bishop of Burgos (1384-1456). Instead of regarding them, as in past scholarship, as 'renegades' or as 'suspected Judaizers' , hybridism enables us to analyse these cases as coherent, albeit sui generis byproducts of a sincere Christian faith coupled with a strong sense of belonging to Jewish notions of peoplehood. However, what began as a salutatory response to past conceptual and ideological rigidities was rapidly transformed into over-subjective and simplistic narrations of the converso phenomenon: as if converso complexity was a mere matter of inner Judeo-Christian dualities. Against this tendency, I endorse a more politicized perception of converso hybridism. This will help us to better understand why and how so many sincere Christian conversos, like Alonso de Cartagena, chose to elaborate on a major Christian theological-political concept: that of the 'mystical body'. Let us remember that, according to Ernest kantorowicz, the concept of a mystical body (corpus mysticum) was a major element in the process of building
Américo Castro's Conversos and the Question of Subjectivity
in: Fernando Rodríguez Mediano and Carlos Cañete, eds., Interioridad, sujeto, autoridad: conversions y contrarreforma en la construcción del sujeto (ss. XVI-XVII), 2017
AbStrACt: Scholars have long puzzled over the disproportionate role played by Judeo-conversos in the innovative cultural currents of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Spain. Recently, a number of scholars have developed the idea that outstanding converso thinkers and authors shared a sensibility that anticipated modernity (particularly Jewish modernity). One of the key features of this sensibility was subjective consciousness. This article explores the foundational work of Américo Castro on this subject. Drawing from nineteenth-century orientalist discourse, Castro understood the subjective awareness of conversos to be a renewed expression of ancient " semitic " characteristics discernable in medieval Jewish (and Islamic) writing, as well as in the Hebrew Bible. In Castro's view, the conver-sos' inherent access to their inner life, stimulated by their experience of repression, allowed them to create a literature that became synonymous with Hispanicity. Castro's conversos, in whom the strongly negative characteristics of his Jews have " disappeared, " are thus harbingers not of modernity, but of a coalescing Spanish national identity. Yet his essentialized view of converso subjectivity has offered support to recent scholarship on " Marranism " and moder-nity, which follows Castro in its converso-centric apprehension of subjectivity in early modern Europe.
Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas, 2019
This essay explores a range of works by Alonso de Cartagena, bishop of Burgos from 1435-1456, and places them within the context of fifteenth-century debates about Conversos, nobility, and Castilian and Spanish national identities. Through careful attention to the role of Jews and Judaism within Cartagena’s thought, it shows that the bishop worked to forge a Judeo-Christian identity for Spain in which Conversos were not simply included or tolerated but required, precisely because of their Jewish lineage, for the Church Militant and the Spanish “nation” to fulfill their divinely-ordained missions. To counter the developing racial logic of opponents to Conversos’ integration, Cartagena distinguished between the relative roles of lineage and will in the Jews’ fall from theological nobility. However, the logic of this approach entailed the exclusion of observant Jews, along with “pagans” and Muslims, from the civil and religious community that Cartagena envisioned.
Fernando/Isaac Cardoso: An Ex-Converso Jewish Thinker of Empire
2015
Heinz Schilling / Luther and the Jews: The Perplexities and Potentials of the 500 th Anniversary of the Reformation 49* Roger Chartier / The Seven Lives of Las Casas's Brevíssima Relación: A Bibliographical History 67* David Graizbord / The Fracturing of Jewish Identity in the Early Modern Jewish Diaspora: The Case of the Conversos 85* Francesca Trivellato / An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Economic Dimension 121* Javier Castaño / Entangled Dowries of Converts in Early Modern Navarre 145* José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim / Oriental Times in the West: The Power of the Sultans and the Jews in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 179* Claude B. Stuczynski / Ex-Converso Sephardi New Jews as Agents, Victims, and Thinkers of Empire: Isaac Cardoso Once Again 209* Daniel Strum / Isaac de Pinto's Political Reflections and the Beginning of the Jewish Political Economy 233* Ruth Fine / Don Quixote or the Quest for Fiction in Spanish Golden Age Literature 249* Matt Goldish / Hakham David Nieto on Divine Providence 267* Moshe Idel / On Gender Theories in R. Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto 281*
Defining "Conversos" in Fifteenth-Century Castile: The Making of a Controversial Category
Speculum , 2022
This article recovers a fifteenth-century debate over the meaning of the category "conversos." Departing from the standard account, in which "conversos" is seen as a neutral category designating Jewish ancestry, we demonstrate that in fifteenth-century Castile, the question of "who is a converso?" had a much less certain answer. Rather than a consistent view of how Jewish converts and their descendants should be classified, contemporary discourses reveal a myriad of options and a deep sense of consciousness about the implications of terminological choices. Drawing on a large range of historical sources, we analyze this terminological struggle, while paying special attention to the debates that followed the revolt of Toledo of 1449. We examine the arguments made by those who sought-or resisted-labeling the descendants of Jews as "conversos" or "neophytes." Furthermore, we explain how debates over such labels were linked to broader interpretations of the meaning of conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Finally, we demonstrate that although the descent-based interpretation of "conversos" eventually prevailed, the problem of classifying Christians of Jewish descent continued to haunt political discourses well into the reign of Isabel I and Fernando II (1474-1504). We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of Speculum for their feedback and comments and Katherine L. Jansen for her editorial guidance. 1 We cannot do justice here to the immense scholarship in this field. For a few examples of studies dealing with the broad impacts of the mass conversions and the converso phenomena, see Yosef Kaplan, An
European Judaism, 2010
This article deals with a famous work on philosophy written by Alonso de la Torre and its fate in the Western Sephardi diaspora. Torre most probably was a converted Jew; he wrote his book half a century after Spanish Jewry underwent a dramatic transformation due to the terrible massacres of 1390 and 1391 in the major cities of Spain and the ensuing conversions of many persecuted Jews. The intolerance that would ultimately lead to the Edict of Expulsion of the Jews of 1492-and so to the origin of the Judeo-Spanish speaking communities in North Africa and the Ottoman Empireprofoundly changed Spain's cultural landscape, ending a centuries-long period of mutual cultural interaction. Yet, paradoxically, with the massive influx of the so-called Conversos into Spanish society, Christian culture also underwent changes, absorbing new experiences and influences. The Visión deleitable y sumario de todas las ciencias by Torre is a didactical work on philosophy and religion that had enormous success in Christian Spain, in spite of its large debt to the Guide of the Perplexed by the Jewish sage Maimonides. Reprinted many times in Catholic Spain, this work was also published in Italy and the Dutch Low Countries, in the communities of those Iberian Conversos who returned to Judaism. There has been huge speculation as to how the Vision deleitable was interpreted by both Christian and Jewish readers. Through a hitherto unstudied report by the Spanish Inquisition and an examination of the editions printed in the Western Sephardi diaspora (Ferrara and Amsterdam) I will offer some fresh reflections on the fascinating reception of this text in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. * Harm den Boer is Professor of Iberoromanic Literature at the University of Basel. His research focuses on Iberian Early Modem Literature and Culture, with special interest in the cultural history of Iberian Jews of Converso origin on which he has extensively published. Den Boer is author of a monography on the Spanish and Portuguese Literature by the Amsterdam Sephardim (La literatura sefardí de Amsterdam, 1995), a Bibliography of Spanish and Portuguese Printing in the Northern Netherlands 1584-1825 (Leiden: IDC, 2004, CD-Rom) and has coauthored studies and editions of several Golden Age Sephardi writers, preparing an edition of the poetry by Miguel (Daniel Levi) de Barrios together with Dr. Francisco Sedeño Rodríguez. 2 On this aspect García López (1991), Salinas Espinosa (1997) and Girón-Negrón (2001) seem somewhat unconcerned. The Ferrara edition is reported untraceable by García López (in fact there are at least three extant copies, two of them in major libraries-see below), and the latter have apparently taken for granted the former's assertion. The same goes for Francisco/Josepho de Cáceres' 1623 edition, mentioned by all three as printed in
Anti-Judaism and a Hermeneutic of the Flesh: A Converso Debate in Fifteenth-Century Spain
Church History and Religious Culture, 2015
This article investigates the manifestations of anti-Judaism that informed fifteenth-century debates over the religious and civic status of the conversos. Insurgents in Toledo supported the persecution of the conversos and their exclusion from public life by insisting on their continued Jewishness despite baptism. Documents such as the “Petition” and the “Sentencia-Estatuto” issued by the rebel regime, the “Appeal and Supplication” written by Marcos García de Mora, and the anonymous “Privilege,” show that the conversos’ opponents developed a hermeneutic of the flesh founded in a reading of the epistles of Paul and informed by their own particular historical context. This hermeneutic afforded the conversos’ opponents a theological basis for shutting certain baptized Christians out of Spanish society based on their carnal descent, weaving race into Christian theology. So useful a conceptual and rhetorical tool was anti-Judaism, however, that even converso defenders employed it as a weapon against their opponents.
The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (review)
Hispanic Review, 2010
j the matter. Claims concerning how Cervantes situates competing social and ethnic interests would be far stronger if they engaged recent work by such scholars as Barbara Fuchs, David Castillo, and William Childers, all of whom have advanced strong arguments that would undermine Pace's configuration of Cervantes's perspective on the hegemonic relationship. The chapter on Fuente Ovejuna is a good deal more successful. Here, Pace's engagement with the critical tradition is far more sustained, which permits him to s t a k eo u taw e l l-a r g u e da n dw e l l-d e f e n d e dp osition. In particular, he skillfully manages to combine the form of his interpretive framework with its content; in other words, here the confessional act is not only likened to a religious one, it can actually be shown to function as one. As he puts it, ''Lope's skillful blending of pastoral confession and monarchical supremacy is a dual attack that at once proclaims the superiority of orderly centralized rule over chaotic regional politics, and the desirable ascendancy of just confessional practices over the cruel inquisitorial counterpart that was becoming increasingly entrenched in Spanish life'' (). In this regard the religious structure of the confessional scene propels the hegemonic restructuring of state power, since ''this fusion of pastoral confession and monarchical rule utilizes pastoral confession to redeem both individuals and the emerging Spanish nation. As with confession generally, it emerges out of inner tension and perceived personal peril. Confession rescues Fuente Ovejuna, and it redeems Spain'' (). The key to this hegemonic redemption, of course, is the position of the Catholic Monarchs as confessors, effectively replacing the traditional position of the feudal lord by way of a state-sponsored religious finesse: ''In Lope's drama, the Catholic Monarchs assume a priest-like role as they hear a public and collective confession that includes a statement of loyalty to the Catholic Monarchs'' (). With this neatly turned chiasmus, Pace has succinctly captured the ideological power of Lope's play, and done so from the vantage of his interest in the confessional form. While in many cases Pace's conclusions remain merely speculative, and while Unfettering Confession is far too brief and the research too thin to do the topic justice, Pace has nevertheless opened an important topic for further exploration.
European Judaism, 2010
This article deals with a famous work on philosophy written by Alonso de la Torre and its fate in the Western Sephardi diaspora. Torre most probably was a converted Jew; he wrote his book half a century after Spanish Jewry underwent a dramatic transformation due to the terrible massacres of 1390 and 1391 in the major cities of Spain and the ensuing conversions of many persecuted Jews. The intolerance that would ultimately lead to the Edict of Expulsion of the Jews of 1492-and so to the origin of the Judeo-Spanish speaking communities in North Africa and the Ottoman Empireprofoundly changed Spain's cultural landscape, ending a centuries-long period of mutual cultural interaction. Yet, paradoxically, with the massive influx of the so-called Conversos into Spanish society, Christian culture also underwent changes, absorbing new experiences and influences. The Visión deleitable y sumario de todas las ciencias by Torre is a didactical work on philosophy and religion that had enormous success in Christian Spain, in spite of its large debt to the Guide of the Perplexed by the Jewish sage Maimonides. Reprinted many times in Catholic Spain, this work was also published in Italy and the Dutch Low Countries, in the communities of those Iberian Conversos who returned to Judaism. There has been huge speculation as to how the Vision deleitable was interpreted by both Christian and Jewish readers. Through a hitherto unstudied report by the Spanish Inquisition and an examination of the editions printed in the Western Sephardi diaspora (Ferrara and Amsterdam) I will offer some fresh reflections on the fascinating reception of this text in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. * Harm den Boer is Professor of Iberoromanic Literature at the University of Basel. His research focuses on Iberian Early Modem Literature and Culture, with special interest in the cultural history of Iberian Jews of Converso origin on which he has extensively published. Den Boer is author of a monography on the Spanish and Portuguese Literature by the Amsterdam Sephardim (La literatura sefardí de Amsterdam, 1995), a Bibliography of Spanish and Portuguese Printing in the Northern Netherlands 1584-1825 (Leiden: IDC, 2004, CD-Rom) and has coauthored studies and editions of several Golden Age Sephardi writers, preparing an edition of the poetry by Miguel (Daniel Levi) de Barrios together with Dr. Francisco Sedeño Rodríguez. 2 On this aspect García López (1991), Salinas Espinosa (1997) and Girón-Negrón (2001) seem somewhat unconcerned. The Ferrara edition is reported untraceable by García López (in fact there are at least three extant copies, two of them in major libraries-see below), and the latter have apparently taken for granted the former's assertion. The same goes for Francisco/Josepho de Cáceres' 1623 edition, mentioned by all three as printed in
Portuguese Studies
In 1933, Gilberto de Mello Freyre (1900-1987) revolutionized historiography with his masterwork Casa-Grande & Senzala ('Masters and Slaves'). The author described his book as a 'Proustian introspection' about everyday dealings between masters and slaves on the sugar plantations of Northeastern colonial Brazil. Freyre conceived that his 'social history of the Big House [Casa Grande] is the intimate history of practically every Brazilian: the history of his domestic and conjugal life under a slave-holding and polygamous patriarchal regime; the history of his life as a child; the history of his Christianity, reduced to the form of a family religion and influenced by the superstitions of the slave hut [Senzala]'. He considered this approach closer to 'the being of a people' and more accurate and meaningful than the pompous and misleading official narratives of political and military heroic feats (p. xliii). 1 In this respect, Freyre was in line with the founders of the French Annales school, Marc Bloch (1866-1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956), who introduced deep, totalizing studies of the past that were supported by the social sciences. 2 Nevertheless, Freyre's work was pioneering, displaying a fusion of his skills as a bohemian journalist and his studies with the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942). 3 Freyre offered a sociological, anthropological and historical reading of Brazil that generates reverence and controversy to this day. Alternately incisive and arbitrary, profound and superficial, iconoclastic and biased, the 1 Throughout this article, the pagination of Casa-Grande & Senzala will follow the second English edition of Freyre's book (Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves [Casa-Grande & Senzala]: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. from the Portuguese by Samuel Putnam, revd edn
Noctua 10 (1-2), 2023
In this paper I focus on the historiographical fate of Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) and Pedro da Fonseca (1528-1599) in two Iberian journals ran by Jesuits and founded in 1945: the Spanish Pensamiento, and the Portuguese Revista portuguesa de filosofia. I endeavor to show that the discussions of Suárez's and Fonseca's ideas on these journal is a twosided case of constructing the legacies of major figures in late scholasticism, and I emphasize how the demand to identify cultural national heroes intertwines with theoretical and ideological elements, especially the peculiar history of the Iberian Peninsula, and to the historical relationships between Spain and Portugal. With regard to Suárez, the Pensamiento group strives to carve out a specific place for Neo-Suarezianism within Neo-Thomism, also via a substantive reassessment of Suárez's importance in the history of scholasticism and of philosophy in general. Hence, Suárez's thought undergoes triumphant reevaluation, which even aims at ousting Aquinas as the ultimate reference of scholasticism, to make Suárez's Thomism the principal authority of contemporary schools. By contrast, Fonseca remains a rather obscure and neglected figure, dug up by his fellow compatriots on the Revista portuguesa de filosofia, also against this attempt at establishing a Suarezian, Spanish hegemony.
Introduction: Cultural and Religious Boundary-Crossing in Early Modern Spain
Jewish History, 2021
This issue of Jewish History brings together the work of scholars who are exploring the entanglement of traditions and identities among the three major religio-ethnic groups in early modern Spain. These scholars are participating in a broad shift in early modern Spanish historiography in recent decades. It challenges a traditional conception according to which the historical trajectories of "Old Christians," judeo-conversos (henceforth "conversos"), and moriscos (baptized Muslims and their descendants) were essentially separate. According to this conception, each population developed within its own rather fixed psychic and cultural boundaries. The scholarly segregation of these populations has been the norm in both of the major traditional conceptualizations of early modern Spanish history. One, which goes back to medieval times and held sway in the conservative academic culture of modern Spain, perpetuates a view of Spain as inherently Catholic and European. The other, with deep roots in the Protestant world, presents early modern Spain as a stagnant backwater where cultural creativity and dissent were crushed by a repressive church, state, and inquisition. Different as they are, both conceptualizations have had the effect of submerging early modern Spain's religio-ethnic minorities beneath the surface of "mainstream" Spanish history. It is true that the influential, if idiosyncratic, work of Américo Castro in the 1940s and 50s challenged both paradigms. Castro envisioned Spanish society and culture as having been shaped from the Reconquista onward not, as others would have it, by the dominance of the majority population of Spanish Catholics, but by the dynamic interactions of Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim "castes." Today, the speculative, tendentious approach of Castro, with its thinly-veiled racism, has been largely discredited; however, in its time, Castro offered a precocious vision of a Spain whose major, enduring contours emanated from a mixing of cultures. Traditional Jewish scholarship produced an alternate perspective on early modern Spain. It has focused on a single population (the conversos), a single institution (the Inquisition), and a single form of religious dissent (crypto-Judaism). It has represented the history of the forcibly baptized Jews and their descendants in the Iberian Peninsula as an intrinsic part of centuries-long Jewish diaspora history. It served to corroborate the familiar contours of Jewish history, resonating with the themes of persecution and resistance in Jewish collective consciousness. Whether we read the work of major Jewish historians who have studied Spanish converso experience (Cecil Roth, Yitzhak Baer, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Benzion Netanyahu, and David Nirenberg, among others) or textbooks and popular narratives of Jewish history, we are presented with a relationship between the dominant Spanish-Catholic population and descendants of baptized Jews that was relentlessly antagonistic. This is hardly surprising. The broad contours of Jewish/converso existence in early modern Iberia were defined by the traumatic experiences of coerced mass conversion, systematic inquisitorial persecution, expulsion, and racial discrimination. The sources include a large corpus of virulent anticonverso propaganda as well as an ample stockpile of bitterly anti-Catholic converso utterances; these too have reinforced the image of Old Christians as persecutors and of conversos as victims. Among Jewish scholars active in the post-Holocaust period, a focus on the traumatic aspects of converso existence (including exclusion based on "purity of blood" laws) was understandable. Yet there was a more fundamental reason for the highlighting of Old Christian persecution and converso resistance, namely the persistence of a long historiographical tradition that holds Jewish society to be existentially at odds with Christendom. It was only in the 1980s and 1990s-at a time when historians across fields were becoming aware of the degree to which scholars had tended to "essentialize" ethnoreligious groups, overlooking the frequent everyday intimacy among them-that scholars of Jewish history began acknowledging the fluidity and variability of Jewish-Christian relations, even in periods when intergroup tensions ran high. 1 The growing prevalence in these years of a theoretical notion of "identity" that was inherently unstable and multilayered, along with the increasing perception of group boundaries as being malleable and constantly negotiated, further eroded the clear-cut distinctions that once prevailed.
The Freedom of the Gospel: Aquinas, Subversive Natural Law, and the Spanish Wars of Religion
Modern Theology, 2015
This article responds to the recent challenge directed at the Thomistic tradition for ignoring the modern/colonial problem of race by claiming that the Spanish conquests in the New World precipitated a critical debate about religious coercion centered on the permissibility of using war and slavery to convert Amerindians. It argues that key Dominican theologians (Domingo de Soto and Bartolome de las Casas) trained in Thomistic commentary categorically rejected medieval/early modern justifications for religious wars by appealing to an apostolic ethic of evangelization grounded in the scholastic tradition of natural law. The result was an unprecedented defense of human equality and natural rights protecting the spiritual and political freedom of Amerindian peoples.