Men of the Nation Part 6

In the Phantasmagoria of History

La perspective n’est pas un instrument des représentations exactes, mais un mensonge.[1]

Perspective is not an instrument of precise representation, but a lie.

Anamorphosis

The Baroque mentality thinks, feels, remembers and articulates itself through what Jurgis Balstruŝaistis calls  “depraved perspectives,” not so much attempting to represent the world as it really is or seems to be, but what it hides inside itself.    An offshoot of the Tridentine shift in sensibilities that reacted to the reformation’s turn against imagery and ritual transformations, anamorphoses attempt to show how appearanfes are by definition deceptive and demonic, and therefore must be manipulated so as to release the powers of truth shackled to illusion an delusion.  The anamorphotic artist stretches commonsense perceptions out of shape, squashes them into deceptive and seemingly meanings lines, shadows or glimmers of light; so that it takes the power of mirrors, physical and moral squinting, and intellectual faith to open them up to understanding.

Phantasmagoria

A phantasmagoria goes beyond the notion of phantasms and hallucinations.  It is, for the nineteenth century especially, the predecessor of the kind of motion pictures that reprodue, enhance and deepen the mystery of prestigitation, as in the silent films of George Méliès—unlike the motion pictures or images in motion from Mery through to the Lumière Brothers that claimed a scientific accuracy in representation.  In the 1790s a fantasmagorie was an elaborate multi-media performance—musical and tactile, acoustic and visual—creating an atmosphere where the expectations of the real were exploded into fragments of illusion, the contours of history shredded and released into the winds of anxiety and fear.  For some historians and scientists, the metaphoric use of the term phantasmagoric became a label equivalent to fantastic or extravagant, in both a positive way (when the world of nature revealed all its unforeseen and unexpected dimensions to the microscope, telescope, and photographic lens) and a negative way (when the Kantian and Nietzschean sense of trust in positivism broke apart into uncertainty, relativism and skeptism).  For others, the term became a pure pejorative, a put-down for the unrefined, irrationalism of the popular mind, the unsophisticated would-be thinker, and the believer in all the pseudo-sciences the century was prone to explore.

Palimpsest

The palimpsest, as we have seen, extrapolates from the economic use of expensive vellum or parchment the way in which manuscripts were scraped clean of previous writing and then fresh text was inscribed on the supposedly tabula rasa.  The point of the general use of the term derives from the fact that the cleared page is not really a blank sheet at all: whatever is written over it is at least physically changed in its appearance through the indentations, bumps and stains left on the original manuscript.  Moreover, when Freud tried to describe the layering of memories in the mind, he used a variation on the palimpsest: the magic writing tablet, the kind children use, where after pressing with a stylus on a waxed tablet covered by a transparent sheet, that sheet is then raised, apparently clearing the tablet for fresh writing, but actually leaving traces of previous impressions—and the longer the tablet is used the more likely the smooth surface will have disappeared altogether. 

Returning to the concept and metaphor of the palimpsest, it is now possible, through electronic filters and magnification, to discover under the latest writing all or some of the previous content of the pages.  In the same way, too, modern art historians, prior to restoration work or as aids to the establishment of questionable authorship and provenance, x-ray canvases in order to reveal prior works or rough sketches or shifting methods of brushwork and color application.  But there were fashionable instances, along with strategic usages in the service of intelligence networks, to write two or more textual discourses over one another, perhaps each slanted in different directions.  A further extension of the idea occurs when old manuscript pages, whole or in fragments, are used as stiffening for the binding of new books; they may subsequently be excised and restored to readability.

Each of these devices and figurative uses of the mechanical term leads towards greater understanding of the “nationality” here in discussion.

The Evidence and its Commentaries

A section of Ammiel Alcalay’s Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 called “The Quill’s Embroidery: Untangling a Tradition” cites part of an argument that takes place in Albert Memmi’s novel The Scorpion (1969) in which Uncle Makhlouf responds to his young nephew, Alexandre Mordechai Benillouche’s complaint that rabbinic writings are nothing but commentaries and commentaries on commentaries, with nothing original in them.  In Alcalay’s paraphrase—or commentary on this commentary—the older man explains the position of traditional Sephardic rabbis:

Poor and almost blind, a tireless weaver of silk, Uncle Makhlouf, although his text is specific and his presence may be our absence, effortlessly eclipses us: having skipped modernity altogether, he is already well on his way into the “postmodern.”  His sense of palimpsest, that beneath one text there is always another, strikes the bedrock of Jewish thought but without implying the presence of an Ur-language, as many considered Hebrew “man’s” or, more precisely, Adam and Eve’s first tongue. [2]

In this kind of palimpsest there is no original writing.  The text is always already writing new text over itself and weaving out of its own threads new patterns of meaning.  Nothing is scraped away, just as in history—that of a people or nation, like that of an individual and a family—is ever completely left behind and forgotten.  In regard to the Jews of the Peninsula from the end of the Middle Ages, the palimpsest is even more complex and tightly woven.  Trying to grasp what this phenomenon is, Alcalay uses a different metaphor:

…forged in the cauldron of the Inquisition, little attention has been paid to the writing of marranos, conversos, and crypto-Jews as reactions to catastrophe, whose works created by those who were, as Shmuel Trigano writers in The New Jewish Question, “both the prototype and the anguished laboratory of modernity; the ‘political animal’ divided into a private, fantasizing persona, and the universal citizen, abstract and theoretical.  Like their more glorified and well-known predecessors in Islamic Spain, Sephardic Jews writing during and after the Inquisition faced this new state  of being polymorphously, in many guises and under many rubrics: as crypto-Jews or the offspring of conversos bearing secret messages….  [3]

This takes us back to our distinction between conversos or New Christians, both a general term for all the Sephardim forced to the baptism fount or voluntarily submitting to conversion for strategic, cynical or spiritual reasons, and the two other categories: Crypto-Jews, the polymorphous individuals and families that attempt to show a Christian exterior and maintain a Jewish interior—in their homes and in their souls; and Marranos, the anamorphotic individuals and families that are forever changing their shape, their belief, and their practices, while maintaining as orthodox an external appearance as Catholics as necessary—and sometimes believing piously in it, though sometimes they allow their profound doubts or their radical revisions of Judaism and Christianity to show through because they can no longer tell the difference.  In these latter senses, what seems best is the figure of the palimpsest as the superficial text through which a variety of prior discourses shows through and whose very shape and texture constrains the mode of the newest form of writing.

There is continuity in the DNA of Jews that defies historical expectations.  To outsiders Jews seem a coherent, mystiufying whole, but from within to individuals, small communities and cultural units it seems like a phantasmagoria—an overwhelming, often blinding confusion of twisted historical threads.  Thus, on the one hand, the genetic code indicates that despite all the wanderings and transformations in superficial culture that Jews have undergone—including intermarriage with non-Jews and rape by persecutors—the similarities of Jews to each other, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, is more than with any of the peoples amongst whom they have lived for centuries or millennia.  Yet, on the other hand,  there are significant cultural distinctions between these two major streams of the Jewish people, and often quite disparate personality types, with emotional and intellectual proclivities that stand out to those who see the two communities interact.  We know today that evolutionary developments can often be quite sudden in terms of geological time—or even historical longue durée.  Briefly put, three positions need to be stated:

1. Darwinian evolution occurs along three trajectories: (a) species differentiation based on natural selection, (b) species specializations and refinements based on sexual selection, and (c) cultural fine-tuning based on historical circumstances and choices.

2. The changes caused by the last two modes of evolution are both punctual and reversible, that is, they occur to meet crises and often include regressions to previous forms of lesser specialization in order to confront dangerous shifts in the environment or in political situations.

3. These last kinds of genetic shifts, which take place in terms of the expression of genes rather than in terms of genetic modification of the genome itself, can be seen in very short periods of historical time, sometimes within one or two generations; as for example, the lowering of the age of menarche, the immune response to new diseases, and the dominance of certain personality traits created by traumatic events, such as exile, massacre and loss of social or financial status for specific groups.

When the Sephardim caught up in the maelstrom of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Iberian persecutions found themselves divided between states, religions, languages and cultures, they nonetheless felt deep within themselves sufficient historical identity to call this diverse, fuzzy set of peoples a naçio.  Inadvertently, too, because they could not have been conscious of the implications of what they were experiencing and doing, they also created themselves as a new nation.  How so? 

1.       A careful selection of marriage partners that cut across international boarders and divisions of religion, often with community funds to support poor or orphaned young brides with dowries and to ensure legacies preserved despite conversions and departures by individuals and branches of the family.

2.       A selection of children to be removed from the gene-pool by commitment to Christian religious life (e.g., priests, monks, nuns), often where parents could not entrust the boy or girl with the family secrets.

3.       Preference for children and marriageable age sons and daughters who survive frequent voyages back and forth to diverse parts of the world, with different climates and epidemiological environments.

4.       Emphasis on cleverness with languages and adaptability to changing, often dangerous circumstances, and an ability to keep secrets, perform divergent public and private roles, and keen sense of loyalty to the family and the larger network of relatives and business associates.

5.       Development of new childrearing practices which emphasize training in obedience to commands in times of danger but seeking out creative and witty modes of lateral thinking. 

6.       Rebellious adolescents who might divulge secrets or seek revenge on parents, siblings or other members of the group would be ostracized, expelled or disposed of in other ways.

Throughout these circumstances, it is important to remember, individuals, families and the larger community of Sephardim underwent nothing short of a series of repeated, often intensified traumatic experiences, each of which created disruptions of any normality within the development of the child and the family, caused new kinds of anxiety as parents could no longer trust in and became frightened their sons and daughters’ innocence and childish garrulity, and, above all, forced people to remain forever on the alert for signs of jealousy, envy and spite in near and close relatives, in servants and associates, and in friends and neighbors.  In brief, as the Sephardim reconstituted themselves in the wake of the initial crises and the long series of aftershocks over many generations, the core of the new identity as a secret nation was not merely the secrecy and duplicity that was demanded of its members but the painful memories and the anxious anticipations of persecution and betrayal that was always imminent.  Unlike other nations which seek to broadcast their national identity and character in public symbols and celebrations, as well as give it permanence and effect in state and civil institutions, the Homens de Nação had to hide their collective status from outsiders and signal its existence by covert and coded words, images and rituals. 

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[1] Jurgis Baltruŝaitis, Anamorphoses: ou Thaumatrurgis Opticus, les perspectives dépravées (Paris : Flammarion, ;  1984)  p. 67

[2] Stavans, p. 402.

[3] Stavans, p. 400.

Men of the Nation Part 5

 A Palimpsest People              

On ne sait ce dont on doit s'étonner le plus : de l'habileté et l'influence puissantes des faiseurs juifs, de la naïve ignorance de la commission d'enquête, ou de la bonne grâce avec laquelle le public se laissait prendre à cette fantasmagorie cousue de fil blanc.[1]

It is not clear which is the most astonishing thing: the powerful abililty and influence of the falsifying Jews, the naïve ignorance of the commission of inquiry, or the good grace with which the public lets itself be led by a white thead into this phantasmagoria.

This section of the essay deals with three special words to describe the condition of the men of the nation we have been discussing. These terms—phantasmagoria, palimpsest and anamorphosis—designate ways of mixing different ingrediants, holding in suspension different elements, hiding different component parts, and allowing the differences to break forth into the light and dazzle spectators and participants alike.  Our approach is psychohistorical and does not follow academic protocols of historiography, and draws on insighrs form psychoanalysis, to be sure, but also cultural anthropology and art history.[2]

The normal modern sense of nationality derives from the idea of the nation-state and seems to combine the concept of citizenship and ethnicity, as well as language and religion or at least culture.  Contemporary usage also suggests that the nation is defined by its shared—sometimes consistent or coherent—political and economic system.   Though the use of the word nation in the United States and a few other so-called western democracies tends towards a sense of shared allegiance to the state and its written or unwritten constitution and yet also includes the ideal of pluralism and multi-culturalism,.  This sense of nationality,  insofar as all those who swear allegiance to the flag (banner, enseign, standard) as the iconic centre of historical and social continuity no matter the individual’s country of origin, mother tongue or private confessional status, become more than legal citizens of the state.  They have been boiled down in the melting pot into one people.   However, in other modern states, such as Canada or the United Kingdom, the word still contains inflections that emphasize a particular language, religion or historical culture as normative.[3]

But though there may be a superficial resemblance between this kind of contemporary inclusiveness in the Disaporic Sephardi[4] understanding of naçio, that national sense developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries originates in a very different conceptual framework. It must be seen in relation to its early modern definition conceived within a Baroque mentality and developed under conditions of forced dispersion and strategies of constant duplicity.   That is, in the first instance, the Sephardic nation can be defined by what it is not.  It is not a people who share a political space and allegiance to a particular political regime.  It is not a community of faith who share a common religious ideology or loyalty to a common church or synagogue.  It is not a group of individuals and families who speak the same mother tongue, share the same cultural habits, or believe in the same political values.  Instead, in subsequent instances. they do share a historical memory of once having been a part of a religious community with shared language, culture and beliefs.  This collectively rememebred background develops to include a variety of experiences by which they became separated to a certain extent.  It is not only a  memory of persecution and suffering, but  of created differences constantly renewed and therefore in a state of flux.[5] 

While they share much in this way with other Jews and even with the non-Jewish societies they come to inhabit, they do not share everything.  They are a family, or at least like an extended family, whose members recognize common ancestors, and who therefore feel comfortable working with one another at most times and across long distances; they intermarry and undertake a range of mutual obligations and responsibilities—care for and education of each others’ children, to protect the closeness of marital ties, to share feelings of charitable responsibility sometimes agaionst the grain of national, economic or religious interests, and above all to trust in many though not all financial and commercial dealings.[6]

 If we can extrapolate from contemporary writing—the kind of thick autobiographical explorations of intimate feelings that are not possible in earlier texts—we can begin to grasp this sense of this special; kind of nationality created around a shared difference in most other matters considered essential to the concept amongst nationaoity elsewhere.  Ruth Knafo Setton, for example, expresses it this way in “Ten Ways to Recognize a Sephardic Jew-ess’”:

Our nomadic history has given us a variety of languages, none of which is ours, but all of which we have learned to speak—with a bite.  You can recognize us by the rage we carry in  us… [7]

Or take this instance of the same typical attitude deeply ingrained in the soul of the modern Sephardi writer, this comment from Gini Alhadeff’s 1997 autobiography, The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family:

The Sephardi Mediterranean from which I come is a world of many languages and no borders. My father’s family speak Ladino among themselves; my mother speaks French.  Most of them have a “foreign accent” in every language they speak, though they speak fluently.  Contained in this trace of an accent, in this shared difference, is the nature of their identity: belonging everywhere, but not quite…..Our generation, that of my brothers and myself, has achieved a deeper level of camouflage: we too belong everywhere and nowhere, but this telltale racial characteristic has been obscured by the chameleon skin of our new identities….I am the worst of the chameleons: I have swallowed several ethnic identities whole and no single one lords it over the others.  They are all equal and fully developed….There is an “original me” in every language I speak, though this “original” is constantly rendered false by the presence of other, just as original, “originals.” [8]

A little while further into her memoir, Alhadeff continues:

We lived in Alexandria, Cairo and Khartoum, then Tokyo, London and New York.  For a time between Alex and Tokyo, we lived at my grandparents’ house in a place called Buguggiate, near Varese in northern Italy.  My elder brother, Giampi, was sickly and had been sent to Switzerland with a witchlike governess called Mademoiselle Pourchot who was obsessed with table manners and little else in the realm of human endeavor.  My younger brother, Gianchi, and I went to an Italian school in the nearby town of Azzate, where for the first time, in grade school, we studied what was after all meant to be our mother tongue. (In fact, we had already learned Arabic and French, and though the first was soon forgotten for lack of practice, the second is what we spoke at home[9]

In this way, using a contemporary instance, the naçio can be seen as a network of individuals and families tied together by family histories, interlocking commercial activities, and mutual aid in social and political obligations.  Virtually every family, then, is located in many places, simultaneously and/or sequentially, speaks many languages but always, as it were, with a foreign accent, and believes it can and must trust and be trusted by its fellow Sephardim, whether or not they have remained Jewish, returned to Judaism, are waiting to escape from Lands of Idolatry, or operate for strategic, cynical or pious reasons as Christians.  They are aware that any moment—or at least once their own lifetimes—they may be forced to escape from persecution, to change their culture, language or religion.  Therefore, each family and each individual in that family also know that at some point in their lives—if not many times—they will have to think through who and what they are in relation to their surrounding culture, including their closest friends and most intimate business associates, as well as other members of their household and extended families in various parts of the world.  Unlike most people who constitute a nation, they cannot accept their place in the world—their ethnicity, language, culture, religion—as an unquestioned certainty.

I want to call such a nation, the Sephardic Nation in Exile of the early modern period, a palimpsest.  In the first instance, a palimpsest literally is a vellum or parchment sheet or book (scroll or codex) whose original text is rubbed or scraped off and a new text inscribed on it.  No matter how different the second writing is from the first, the vellum or parchment retains an underlying record of the original text; and by means of special dyes, lighting or x-rays it is now possible to bring into readable focus the first writing.  In the second instance, a palimpsest is a form of double or triple inscription, by which a single or multiple texts are written over one another.  Sometimes this is done as an expedient to save the expense of preparing a second vellum or parchment.  Sometimes it is done as a cryptographic device to hide a secret message under the dominance of a darker ink, a more distinct handwriting or some other technique. Sometimes the palimpsest is created as a stylistic feature to embellish the appearance or the meaning of the plainly written first text.  In the third instance, however, the palimpsest exists in a more metaphorical sense, not as an actually doubly- or triply inscribed object, but as a complex rhetorical or literary conceit, so that all or some of the words, phrases and sentences may be read in several different ways simultaneously, alternatively, or sequentially.  This may involve different kinds of word-play (puns or paronomasia), recombination of letters and anagrammes, bi- or trilingual calques, and a variety of allusions to historical, mythical or private codes.

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[1] Serendat de Belzims, Antisemitres en Europe (Paris : Librairie Saint-Joseph Tolra, 1891) p. 238

[2] Norman Simms, “The Phantasmagoria of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism” Mentalities/Mentalités 24:2 (2010) 52-64.

[3] Canada speaks of two founding nations or peoples interchangeably, though it now allows or mandates recognition of indigenous “native” peoples as well.  The United Kingdom allows a degree of internal autonomy to its constituent regional untis because of their historical identities, along with dialects and folkloric customs.  Switzerland allows for cantonal differenfes with some overlapping of linguistic distinctions and religious tolerastion.  Belgium exists with an ongoing tension between its Flemish and Francophone populations (and to a lesser degree its German-speaking minority.

[4] I must ask the reader to keep in mind that the use of Sephardic here is not the common political sense found in Israel, where it seemsd to designate and include all of Oriental Jewry—not just those from Spain and Poertugal and their South American former colonies, but also Arab-speaking communities in the Arabic-speaking and former Ottoman Empire regions, the Levant, the Balkans, the Mediterranean Islands and North Africa; in brief, to be Sephardfic is not to be Ashkenazi and vice versa.   The usage here is more specific and historical;: with the legal disappearance of Sepharad as a Jewish region in Iberia and the outlawing of Judaism as a religion, the people who identify as ”men of the nation”  live in the fluid, reversible, unsteady condition we have been attempting to describe.  Many, if not most, live for at least part of their lives or consider themselves to belong to families that are sometimes more or less in the condition of Crypto-Jews and Marranos.

[5] They still share languages, cultures, and beliefs, but not as their primary way of presenting themslevs to one another or outsiders. 

[6] One thinks of the large and powerful international conglomerates that bind together members of the same family that over-ride usually (although not always) major political and military events.

[7] Stavans, p. 365.

[8 Stavans, p.  339.

[9] Stavans, p. 343.

Men of the Nations Part 4

A Chosen People or a People Frozen in Time

If one pretends to formulate a veridication as an assertion, an oath as a denotative expression , and (as the Church began to do from the fourth century on by means of conciliar creeds) a profession of faith as a dogma, then the experience of speech splits, and perjury and lie irreducibly spring up.[1]

The question of nationhood in regard to Jews and Judaism is partly embedded in a theological tradition of being a chosen or peculiar people who have entered into a covenant with God, and partly involved with modern European notions of nationalism and the nation-state through the development of political Zionism at the end of the nineteenth century and the founding of the State of Israel in 1947.  Yet there are other factors to be considered as Jews passed through the post-medieval world into modernity, and specifically those Sephardic Jews who began identify themselves simply as el naçio, “the nation”.   

In this, these Spanish and Portuguese Jews and New Christians in their Diaspora—wherein individuals and families did not distinguish between practicing Jews who never converted and those who quickly returned to Judaism as soon as it was possible, as well as Crypto-Jews, and conversos, and New Christians in general of a Sephardic origin—seem to stand between the medieval idea of a “nation” as a corporate body which could be located anywhere but enjoying certain extraterritorial rights and obligations  because of their communal identity and the early modern notion that sees the “nation” as a combined ethnic and civil identity connected intrinsically with a specific territory historically considered to define their own rights, privileges and obligations.  This last concept leads towards the development of the nation-state which adds linguistic and mystical elements to the paradigm.  

In order to approach this specifically Sephardic idea of the naçio we need to distinguish between three broad categories of approach: What it is that defined Jews in the eyes and laws of their hegemonic neighbors; what these Jews thought they were saying and feeling when they called themselves a nation; and what we can determine about the position of both Jews and non-Jews in this period from our own perspective of post-modern nationalism and the nation-state.

The traditional Jewish sense of identity belongs to the biblical concept of the Chosen People, a group of people singled out by God to receive the Law at Sinai and enter into a covenantal relationship.  All the other nations (goyim) are children of Adam and Eve and are included in the Noachic Covenant symbolized by the rainbow; and to that extent they are contractually obliged to live by the last seven commandments of the Law.  They may earn a portion of the world to come and through their own righteousness and wisdom provide understanding and guidance to the world.  The Children of Israel, however, have special responsibilities, a code of 613 halachic mitzvot to live by, and an obligation to be a light unto the nations.  They also inherit through their genealogical connections the build-up of good deeds from ancestors, along with their own acts of loving-kindness and obedience, no matter how small these acts may seem, often in oblique and symbolic ways due to the harsh circumstances they find themseves in.

To be sure, by their disobedience and forgetfulness, Jews are punished in persecution, exile and humiliation, thus becoming a nation without a place, without a state, and without a temple.  But this is not a consequence of an Original Sin, no more so than it is genetic taint at the very essence of each individual’s being.  Simns are errors committerd and therefore subject to correction.  Should a person con tinue in their error, they remain a Jew, albeit a bad Jew: unless they deliberately renounce their allegiance to God and the Law. But this persistence does not necessarily entail the continuity of Jewish identity passed on to their children, should the sons nd dauighters decide to adhere to the Law,

At the same time, though, the Sephardim in this Exile from their cultural homeland  are also a people with a living history that they self-consciously inhabit together, and like all Jews they are bound to a dual Law, both the Written and the Oral Torah, which teaches them the ways of justice and loving-kindness that must be put into practice if the sanctification of the world is to take place, and a weekly Sabbath which provides regular if temporary experience of the world-to-come.

For those people expelled from Spain and forcibly converted in Portugal, unless they choose to reintegrate into existing Jewish communities or reform their old Spanish and Portuguese nation, find themselves among the Christian nations as a barely tolerated minority.  The Church held them up as an example of God’s wrathful displeasure at their refusal to accept the Christian dispensation, the Jews of Western Europe. Unlike the rare opportunity offered in Iberia and for a relatively brief time where they believed they had been absorbed or assimilated into the larger society and participated a creative way in the cultural activities of the whole society, in most circumstances Sephardim—hidden under a variety of designations—suffered legal debilities, were all but ostracvised by the m ajority populations, and had to form some sort of compensatory nationality outside the usual customs and regulations of such legal entitities, not least the lack of territorial jurisdiction over their own individual and communal lives.

Yet despite this set of restrictions, they felt themselves to be a proud and resourceful people, playing Christian off Christian or even off Muslim and gaining more than their apparently fair share of the riches available.  Sephardim claimed to be distinct from their fellow Jews (Ashekanazi mostly, but also Italian and occasionally Oriental) in the rest of Europe and in the territories under Islamic hegemony (where they accepted the conditions of Dhimmitude): they saw themselves as  different because. So they claimed, they could trace their ancestors back to Israel before it fell under pagan domination and before their less noble compatriots colluded in the rejection and killing of Jesus Christ; they felt themselves different because they traced their cultural roots to a time when Judaism both drew from and helped enrich the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome; and they felt themselves different because negotiated the dynamic interplay of Muslim  and Christian in a Golden Age of Iberian culture.

The Golden Age of toleration and cultural flowering in Iberia, however, was geographically limited, as well as short-lived.  The wealth and influence was evident for only a few great families.  The culture created was indeed admirable, but it was unable to sustain itself during the acrimonious Maimonidean controversies, which weakened the communal structures and made them increasingly vulnerable to Christian persecution.  To a great extent, in their national pride, they fooled themselves, and the pogroms and mass conversions that began in 1390 and the crisis that ensued over the following century exposed their real lack of strength in political and social terms. 

After untold generations of seeing that Christianity had nothing of real value to offer to a Jew—neither in the way of salvation from the world or of couture in the world—from the twelfth century onwards, two things changed that attiude.[2] 

On the one hand, the so-called little renaissance of the period, with its development of universities and its flowering of courtly and popular literatures in the vulgar languages, the emergence of artistic schools of representation and scientific accuracy, and the growing richness and sophistication of courtly society, urban civilization, and ecclesiastical patronage of music and sculpture; this began to make Christendom more inviting as a site of domestic, commercial and intellectual life.  On the other hand, following the Maimonidean controversies and the apparent triumph of irrationalistic mystical schemes and the production of scholarly methods based on pilpul or mechanistic casuistry, the hold of the Suynagogue on intelligent, imaginative and spirtiitually-minded Jews became to loosen. 

At the same time, once some rabbinical figures of great stature began to convert and enter the theological debates of the time, the specific contents of anti-Jewish preaching and governmental attempts to control the population became more intelligent—the preaching friars and university lecturers elarned about the Talmud, albeit in a biased and hostile way, and challenged Jewish students and community leaders to answer questions often too difficult for them to deal with.  Thew anti-Maimonidists, who had called on the Church to admonish and punish their rationalist opponents, led to the burning of the Torah, persecution and closure of traditional Yeshivot, and a more general feeling that the old ways had let the people down. 

It would be overly simplistic to say that Sephardic society reacted to these extended trauma of painful events by creating a mythic dream of kabbalistic importance for themselves, as though the riots, massacres, inquisitional processes and the laws of purity of blood were at once the birth pangs of the messianic age and at the same time recapitulations of the exodus from Egypt which had culminated in the theophany at Sinai.  However, it is possible for us to see that the extended period of crisis provided an opportunity for the Sephardim—whether as Jews or returning Jews, whether as Crypto-Jews or as Marranos—to recreate themselves as modern Europeans, perhaps the first national group to make this transition as a whole—indeed, to conceive of themselves as a nation without requiring that their be ethnic, linguistic, cultural or confessional conformity.  In other words, what the outside world tended to take—and still does to a large extent—as people frozen in time, fossilized by the dead hand of the superseded Law—is rather a people self-chosen to confront the ordeal of modernity as a new kind of a nation, a naçio distinctly Jewish and yet distinct from the medieval rabbinic image of a nation of priests or scholars, and different from the demonized image of anti-Semites of a clannish, untrustworthy and hateful creatures.

Following the great anti-Jewish riots of the 1390s, the Iberian Peninsula saw waves of pogroms, forced baptisms, voluntary conversions, and increasing emigration of whole Jewish communities.  By the time of the establishment of the Inquisition in Castile in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, forced conversionary preaching, harassment of backsliders, and inauguration of racial laws (the need for “pure blood” to hold public, civil, and church positions, to participate in state activities, and to serve in the army or travel overseas) made life virtually impossible for practicing Jews and for Crypto-Jews who had assumed a nominal conversion and marriage into the landed gentry and title-holding aristocrats would allow for a normalizing of social and commercial activity.  The expulsion of Jews in 1492 from Spain and the 1497 forced conversion en masse of all Portuguese Jews were the final straws that broke the camel’s back. 

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[1] Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, p.  58.

[2 Agamben says: “Christianity is, in its proper sense of the term, a religion and a divinization of the Logos.  The attempt to to reconcile faith as the performative experience of a veridiction with belief in a series of dogmas of an assertive type is the task and, at the same time,the central contradiction of the Church, which obloges it, against the clear evangelical command, to technicalize oath and cureses in specific juridical instyitutions.” (The Sacrament of Language, p. 66).  Forced by historical circumstances to live in the midst of a Christendom always teetering on its own contradictions, Jews were both repelled and influenced by the persecutory systems that it everyday confronted.  Its own basic attitudes and practices of living in a world which was both based on an intellectual, literalized Law, and within the structures of a covenant (brit) that bound God and Jews into a horizontal relationship, there was no way to reconcile the tensions between the two religions, not even when some Jews were forced by another set of circumstances to endure baptism and become nominal Christians and, then, once caught in the web of ecclesiastical demand for veridication and veridiction—accepting on faith the truth content of the words used in liturgical practice and the performance of sacramental acts—unable to return into the more argumentative, sceptical and interpretational modes of Judaism.

Men of the Nation, Part 3

NB: In this much-expanded essay on the therortical mental problems of those who defiend themselves as “men of the nation” I for the most part building on previous work, as noted indicated in the end notes—and readers will there find fuller arguments, proof texts, and scholarly citations; new material can be appended in these notes as well.

Nationalism and
the Men of the Naçio

However one understands the etymology of the Greek term for perjury (epiorkos), about which the scholars never stop debating, it is certain that in archaic and classical Greek it is taken for granted.[1]

One of the names used as a general pejorative by rabbis for those Jews who fall under the sway of Greek knowledge—or any classical, pagan, and subsequently non-Jewish civilization—is epikoros.  The name of Epicurus comes to stand in the place of all such materialist, rational thought, not just the more modern sense of epicurean, a lover of sensual pleasures, enjoyment of this world with all its delights and good actions.  The near homonym epiorkos, meaning perjury, could be a designation for the men of the naçio, since they tend to live by simulation, dissimulation, temporizing and general duplicity.  For while, as Agamben shows, the very invention of oaths implies the ability to tell lies under oath, and thus to begin the long journey from living within the bounds of language to the arrival at a time and place where language and things separate and leave a space for sceptical and scientific thoughts, the Crypto-Jew and the Marrano especially can enjoy life only insofar as they divorce themselves from the implicit identity of their inner and outer selves.  This is not a comfortable zone to inhabit.  Yet it is often an exciting and thrilling experience.[2]

In his study of German-Jewish culture in the two centuries leading up to the Holocaust,  Amos Elon points out that,

In Prussian and other German records Jews were often referred to as a nation, a term that had as yet no political connotation.  Derived from the Latin natio, it was originally a genealogical-historical term loosely used by Saint Jerome in his Latin translation of the New Testament to denote non-Christians—that is, “others.”  Its politicization (as in the French “la nation”) came only during the French Revolution.  In Berlin “nation” and “colony” were used interchangeably in speaking of the local Jewish or Huguenot community. [3]

Unfortunately, Elon here begs too many questions to be of much use, especially when, as we shall show, the term (nation or naçio) is a self-designating way of uniting Sephardic Jews inside and outside of Iberia, and whether or not the individuals and families involved remained or returned to Judaism or converted to Catholicism under compulsion (as annusim) or voluntarily—or, as of course, happened in subsequent generations, were born into the double ambiguousness of Crypto-Judaism or Marranism.  On the one hand, as Elon rightly indicates, pre-modern usage—that is, in a period prior to the “nation-state” as a romantically-based term based on nineteenth-century racial biology[4]—“nation” tended to refer to small groups of merchants, students or clerics from one cultural zone or linguistic area residing legally in another; so that it would mean “colony” in the sense of a more or less permanent settlement of “others” in the midst of a different town, kingdom, or institution (university, guild, religious order).  On the other hand, as the reference to Jerome shows, the term “nation” can mean a community in the modern sense of a group of people identified by ethnic, linguistic and confessional markers, but often without any political agency—as one could speak of Germans or Italians before there was a single country called Germany or Italy but only loose conglomerations of cities and principalities and bishoprics or kingdoms sharing a set of related dialects and generally similar social customs; and this sense would derive from the Hebrew word goyim, and would at least within the Yiddish-speaking parts of Europe take on a more specific and negative sense of “the other people”.

Why and how Sephardic Jews after the disasters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to speak about themselves, using a Spanish word, as a nation/naçio is another story.  It is a story that partly overlaps with the general history of European Jewry but takes on specific Iberian coloration in response to the specific conditions created by the persecutions, massacres, mass conversions and expulsions experienced by these people in the transition from medieval to early modern society. But first we need to be sure that we are talking about a distinct historical phenomenon and not an illusion or a delusion created by persecuting agencies.

But not all Sephardim belonged to the special sub-categories of New Christians, Crypto-Jews or Marranos, since not all the Jews of Spain and Portugal had converted either under duress, strategically or being caught up in a communal act by their rabbinical leaders.  Nor did all unconverted Jews leave their ancestral homes on the Peninsula or the various cities, small kingdoms and islands under Spanish jurisdiction elsewhere in Europe, but many stayed behind, especially in Portugal where there was nearly a generation of grace after the formal total baptism of the entire Jewish community before the Inquisition was established; and then later, when the two kingdoms of Portugal and Spain were untied under one  monarch, many Jews either returned to Spain or left Portugal for the first time in order to take advantage of the more relaxed atmosphere and less strict operations of the Spanish Inquisition. 

Significantly, because New Christians could never really shake off the legal debilities of the original conversion acts—even when married into aristocratic or upper middle-class and respectable Spanish families—each individual was born into an existential, epistemological crisis.  He or she had to decide what status they would accept, reject, or (more usually) vacillate between.  Since children also had to be baptized, inculcated in the sacramental system and educated by local parish priests, resident friars or other ecclesiastical figures most boys and girls had to be carefully monitored by their parents.[5]  Whereas traditional Jewish child-reading and domestic customs were built on intense love, tactile reinforcement of the love, and deep integration of religious education into the normal routine of everyday life, those traditions were drastically altered after the sixteenth century in Spain and Portugal.  For one thing, virtually all infants and toddlers could not be made privy to whatever secret rites may have continued within the household; and for many years after had to be kept away from the defining knowledge of the family’s present and historical identity, lest those youngsters blab in the streets or amongst the servants, yield to pressures in the confessional, or in piques of adolescent rage and sibling rivalry tattle on the family.[6]  Second, given the gender distinctions operative in Iberian society, male members of the family had to be educated for public life, both in commercial and juridical terms and in terms of social life; and with the formal institutions of Jewish worship, education and charity outlawed, only a few sons could be trusted to also experience the secret Jewish rituals and be taught rabbinical beliefs and ethical principles.  The teaching role therefore tended to fall virtually completely on the mother, grandmother, aunts and other resident females; and thus the traditional content of female knowledge of Judaism—those concerned with food preparations, family hygiene, relationships with servants, neighbours and more distant relatives, as well as more or less informal songs, stories and practices—tended to replace the intellectual studies of sacred books and the judicial practices of communal governance.

The most intrusive and upsetting aspect of these shifts in customary Jewish family life was the loss of implicit trust, intimacy and bonding between the components of the home (extended households), local communities, and international Jewry.[7]  Since parents could not implicitly trust and be honest with their children—emotionally as well as intellectually—nor feel at ease amongst themselves, their own siblings, cousins and friends, there was a constant sense of tension, anxiety and fear.  Sometimes husbands and wives could not entirely be honest with each other.  Yet in times of acute crisis, these were the very associates one needed to prepare together with for what stories, how much information about family history, and the willingness to accept martyrdom when someone was denounced to the Inquisition by some familiar of the organization.  Sometimes individuals or small groups would try to pre-empt more serious punishments by voluntary appearances before the Holy Office, in the hope that the family wealth and property could be mostly kept intact and ensured of being passed on to the next generations, the reputation would be kept clear of formal charges, allowing for migration to parts of the New World or permitting business trips to foreign lands; but since often enough agents of the Inquisition itself were from once suspect converso families—and this was more true in Portugal than in Spain—the institution was sensitive to the kind of coded words, gestures and signals and behavioural patterns that had been prepared for the confrontation.  Once under suspicion or arrest, cases could drag on for many years, sometimes even for generations, with confiscations, sentences of permanent or temporary exile or servitude on the galleys, long-term wearing of the San Benito that marked penitents.  Those who wished to have their family names entered into the Green Books that listed those with pure blood—lacking the Jewish taint—could bribe officials for this coveted act; and yet the surrounding community would retain their memory of the family’s shame, the very process of obtaining such a legal document indicated existing suspicions, and the backsliding or escape of any one family member would expunge the legal status.  The Inquisition would moreover keep accurate records, compare notes from one jurisdiction to another, and thus when re-arresting individuals or their relatives have ample evidence to force further incriminating confessions on the whole extended—over many lands and continents, as well as over many generations in increasingly long and complex genealogical tables—naçio.

            Anxiety and fear, tension and excitement, hallucinations and hysterics[8]—these tended now to mark out the personality of the members of this nation of Crypto-Jews, Marranos and New Christians.[9] 

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[1] Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath (Homo Sacer II, 3), trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University press, 2011) p. 7.

[2] Norman Simms, “Moving Through Time and Space: Memories, Midrash and Trauma” Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 16 (2002) 223-237.

[3] Elon, p. 23.

[4] The stress on biology in the use of thre word “race” does not clear away most other and older usages until quite late in the century.  Race could designate a family, a city, a professional group, or someother  related collection of people; and such “races” would differentiate national entities, such as the French from the Engoish, oir south Europeans from Northern; or merely country folk from bourgeois town-dwellers, or upper from lower classes.  Individuals and families could change their races through their own effots, by migrating from one place to another, by financial cirumsrtances, external prssures—displacement through immigration, natural disaster, invasion and occupation by foreign armies, etc.  It was the merging of “race” and “species” in evolutionary discoruses, particularly those in Social Darwinism, that led to the worst villification of Jews as another species, race of men—or non-men.

[5] Norman Simms, Children among the Marranos: A Psychohistorical Problem” The Queens College Journal of Jewish Studies  vol. VII (Spring 2005) 35-43.

[6] Norman Simms, “Devoured by Wild Animals: Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress in the Children of São Tomé” Revista Lusófona das Religiões 5:9/10 (2006) 164-179.

[7] Norman Simms, “Jewish Childrearing in Pre-Modern Times” in Simms, Windows on  a Jewish World, pp. 39-58.

[8] Norman Simms, “Bishop Lobo’s Nightmare” Sefarad: The Sephardic Newsletter (23 September 2003) 12:8, part 4 (Sea12.8.4) pp. 1-13.

[9] Norman Simms, review essay: “Marranos: Anamorphoisis 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.

The Nation Part 2

Search for National Symbols
and Myths

Etre Juif, cela ne veut donc pas dire être de la même religion.  Je sais bien qu’on affirme communément le contraire et qu’on affecte de considérer comme ne faisant pas partie d’Israël tous ceux qui ne fréquentent pas les synagogues.[1]

To be a Jew does not mean to belong to the same religion.  I well know that usually they say the opposite and that they try to think that those who do not attend synagogue are not part of Israel.

At the same time when the familiar nations of Europe (e.g., France, England, Spain) moved from feudal and other medieval state-formations began to constitute themselves into centralized monarchies, others remained in fragmentary geographical conglomerates (e.g., Germany, Italy).  But which peoples considered themselves to be a nation and on what grounds?  The nation-state is only partly defined by drawing a line around a specific area and deciding that everyone within it ought to speak the same language, worship the same religious way, and share an ancestral tie with the soil itself.   Something else was needed but even when there were common myths, symbols and political ideals not every group qualified as a state or a nation.  There could therefore be competing systems of belief to draw lines of exclusion and exclusion around the incipient nationalities, such as French, Spanish or Greek.  Legends of historical continuity would be then manufactured to bolster these varying ideologies, often with newly invented roots in what would be termed folklore.

The problem would remain as to what to do with those within the magic circle of nationality who did not conform: they could be expelled, annihilated, forced to convert and assimilate—learn the national language, worship in the national church, where the national clothes and participate in national events, such as war.  What seemed to make Jews most dangerous was that they often tried to do all those things, but still remained different. `There was something about them that smelled bad, often literally.  In Iberia, even if hudndeds of years lay between the time of an ancestor’s conversion and your own life, you and all your family were considered New Christians, and that newness was untrustworthy five generations later as it was on the day of the original baptism.  Jewishness was ineradicable and Jewishness was a pollutant or a cancer in the body politic, as well as in the corpus christi.

As we have shown in the headnote (to Part 1 of this essay) from Eva Alexandra Uchmany, when the New Christians of Portugal—most if not all of them refugees from the persecuitions, massacres and expulsions in Spain—tried to bargain (bribe) the papal authorities (and the Pope himself) not to establish an Inquisition in Portugal, or if it was inevitable, then at least to delay it as long as possible and mitigate its worst aspects, not only did the Sephardim identify themselves as homens de la naçio, but that is how the great churchmen spoke of them: men of the nation.  As we shall see, this was not an inevitable or natural way of speaking about conversos, New Christians, Marranos, neofites or followers of the Dead Law of Moses.  But it was, under the circumstances, an apt expression, best suited to the conditions of the time and the self-image of the individuals and families involved in this desperate attempt to save their lives and fortunes.  We will also show that there is a deep-seated historical reason within Judaism for this way of speaking of themselves, and that it is an important indicator of their adherence to rabbinical law in the tradition of Maimonidean rationalism.

For the Sephardim in general, to distinguish themselves primarily from other Jews—the Ashkenazim, as well as the ancient Levantine and Arabic communities they began to encounter in their Diaspora from Iberia after 1492—and not just from non-Jewish states and anomalous Jewish jurisdictions (e.g. Khazars and a few south Saharan city-states), religions and ethnicities: they, like other peoples beginning to conceive of themselves as a modern nation, searched for appropriate symbols, myths and economic ideals.  This creative enterprise, partly conscious and partly unconscious, had both a regressive tendency, insofar as it idealized the glories of the Iberian past—the Golden Age of El Andalus—with a stress on honor, refinement and cultural achievement, and a radically progressive tendency, insofar as make a sharper break with the feudal, ecclesiastical and linguistic past: the new naçio was not burdened with obligations to the land and archaic crafts, focused on the ethical, legal and mystical interpretation of the religious heritage rather than the ritualistic, allegorical and litteral parsing of texts (pilpul), and expressed itself in a suite of languages and dialects strategically and effectively appropriate to real-world circumstances.

As hinted at in the first section of this essay, there was something very bizarre in its formulation, almost hallucinatory, not quite real in the sense that reality was starting to be thought of by novelists, historians, journalists and bourgeois citizens of secular states.  Whereas anti-Semites, before and after the invention  of the terminology, conceived of Jews as a singular essence: always the same, always aware only being a Jew—locked into the fatuousness of an eternal state that defies all of history’s changes and the historical Jew’s requirement to be at once and different as an individual[2]—the men and women of the naçio had to be born over and over again (become a new, a next, another nation’s generation), from generation to generation, and from one circumstance to another in their own lives, the same to the extent that they remembered who they originally were, where they had shifted to some new projection of identity, and how they could turn again when necessary to some protective version of simulation or dissimulation, temporizing in the whirligig of time and wearing the mask of unchangeableness they hoped would keep them from being subject to interrogation, inquisition, imposition of an unwanted description by the book.[3]]

While it is sometimes said that the development of Lurianic kabbalah is a direct response to the traumatic events of the Iberian crisis among Sephardic Jews, recent studies have shown this to be a major overstatement.  The key features of lurianism—the messianic fervor based on the ideas of tsimtsum and tikkun ha’olam—existed before the profound changes in the position of Jews in Spanish society became evident.  While lurianism came to express certain aspects to the Sabbatean fiasco, as a way of explaining away its most embarrassing and humiliating features. More to the point seems to be the legacy of the Maimonidean controversy.  This ideological struggle between two interpretations of Judaism at once undermined the solid front of the Sephardic community, preparing both sides for strategic and contingent retreats in the face of the massive onslaught against rabbinical authority, and at the same time provided intellectual and emotional ways of coping with the deep splits and weaknesses that followed the crises of the long decade from 1492 to 1506.

This paradoxical combination of pride in archaic Iberian ideals and a hard-headed virtually Machiavellian commitment to the emerging ethic of bourgeois capitalism was made possible by adaptation of traditional Jewish values and heightened family loyalty.  The shared memory of persecution by the Inquisition—and the sense of injustice wrought by a society which had held out the promise of assimilation and freedom from anti-Semitic prejudices—gave to the individuals and families who constituted the nation an impetus to defy the diverse forms of hatred ranged against them in the Lands of Idolatry, in the hypocritical kingdoms of both Catholic and Protestant Europe, and in the seemingly tolerant and welcoming territories under Muslim control.  But how these diverse forces worked together in practice remains to be seen.

However, the homens de la naçio were not ordinary practicing Jews who, having rescued themselves from the trauma of expulsion or even from having escaped at some later point and integrated themselves more or less into existing Sephardic communities around the Mediterranean, the Levant and in the Balkans; they were individuals and families who identified themselves with their own historical experiences of several generations—people who, when they moved from community to community, traded around the world, sent their children out to be married in far-off places, sometimes as Jews, sometimes as nominal Christians, and hence could not pick one of the variations as their own, but only the conglomerate, and the cover-term for this historical experience was men of the nation.

Rather than a state within a state, this Sephardic Nation (meaning not all Jews who originated in Iberia but only those in this special and fluid historical condition of commercial association) is a legal-moral community that crosses state boundaries and other national or religious jurisdictions  It is a form of limited globalism, insofar as the members—individuals, families, commercial enterprises and charitable institutions—consider themselves as more and other than the other legal entities in which they find themselves as unrecognized minorities, marginalized or tolerated if recognized, and depended upon with caution and prudence.

[1] Bernard Lazare, Le nationalisme juif.  Publication de Kademah No. 1 (Paris: Stock et Flammarion & l’Association des Etudiants Israélites Russes,  1898) p. 1.

[2] Lazare, Le nationalisme juif, p. 2

[3] One recalls Archie Bunker’s malapropism in All in the Family when he speaks of the “Spanish Imposition.”