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.
[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.
No comments:
Post a Comment