Nation, Nación and Naçio
Quantunque il similar sia le più
Ripreso, e dia di mala mente
indici,
Si truova pur in molte cose e
molte
Aver fatti evidenti benefici,
E Danni e biasmi e morti aver già
tolte;
Che non conversiam sempre con gli
amici
In questa assai più oscura che
serena
Vita mortal, tutta d’invidia
piena.[1]
Although deceit is mostly disapproved,
Seeming to show a mind malevolent,
Many a time it brings, as has been proved,
Advantages that are self-evident,
And mortal threats and dangers has removed.
Not all we meet with are benevolent
In this our life, so full of envious spite,
And gloomiest by far than it is bright.[2]
“La Gracia Papal costo a los “de
la nación” mas de dos millones de cruzados…En ultimo momento el trato estuvo a
punto de fracasar porque los cristianos nuevos pedían ocho años para reunir la
suma. Pero la amenaza de suspender la
publicación del Breve hizo que todos los “de la nación”, especiados en el
Imperio de Felipe III, contribuyesen a la colecta que se organizó al respecto.”
[3]
There are
many metaphors that come to mind when attempting to understand the character of
Sephardic Jews in general.[4] For example, Ruth Knafo Setton, during an
interview cited by Ilan Stavens in The
Schocken Anthology of Modern
Sephardic Literature (Stavans, p. 361), speaks of an ancient mosaic
composed of small fragments of tile, a jigsaw puzzle with many elusive pieces,
and, more interestingly, a kaleidoscopic image whose Gestalt is constantly shifting and disappearing. These metaphors, one from art and one from
optics, seem more apt than the usual figures of trees, branches and roots, or
other paradigms of rhizomes, scattered seeds, and grafts. Yet though we can hardly geta way from
organic terms, each time we use such a metaphor—dead or alive—we have to hold
it under erasure and try to reconceive the problem in terms that recall its
epistemological as well as genetic, biological or demographic sense. For though their name derives from a geographical
place, the Sefarad of the Bible, taken somewhat ahistorically or at least
anachronistically, to extend from Al Andalus, or the particular Muslim
lands in the south of Iberia, to all of the Peninusula and associated
territories in what is now France and the Mediterranean islands nearby,
Sephardim have been identified also by language and culture, on the one hand,
and by a shared history beginning with the Fall of the First Temple, the
conquest of Israel and Judea by Nebuchadnezzar, and their exile in Babylonia. More modern political history further
complicates the issue because the calamatous disppersions after 1492 have
intrinsically linked Sephardim with other earlier Jeweries in North Africa,
southeastern Europe, and the Levant.
This great Sephardic Diaspora created a new shared memory for all these
peoples, a new language called Ladino, and a new culture deeply imbued with
Arabic and Balkan customs and tastes.
However,
whatever the problematical continuities and coherences inherent in the general
term Sepharad today, this major branch of Judaism seems even more difficult to
conceive of when we start dealing with New Christians, that is, the orignally
Jewish conversos or neophytes still
within the jurisidiction of Spanish and Portuguese religious and civil
law. These so-called Crypto-Jews and
Marranos also, but only to a certain limited degree, dispersed after the crises
of the 16th and 17th centuries in Iberia and its
dominions and ciolonies. In itself, how
these ambiguous, fuzzy and often ephemeral grouopings can be identified for
study seems beyond scholarly control; nomenclature slips and slides through the
historical records, shifting in time and place, and according to which
instiututions or individuals are doing the recording. At times, too, all the words seem
interchangeable, whole at others they seem to reveal important nuances in
belief, religious practice, and political strategy. The precise degree of pejorativeness in the
terms changes and shifts, sometimes more comic or ironic and sometimes more
straightforward in its nastiness and degradation.
Most
puzzling of all perhaps is the way in which Sephardim in the early modern
period, after the immediate crisis of the period from the 1390s to the 1490s,
both conceived and wrote about themselves—all of themselves no matter whether
still in the Lands of Idolatry (places subject to the Holy Office of the
Inquisition and the many laws of blood purity), escaped to West European cities
(e.g., Livorno, Amsterdam, London) where they could choose to return to Judaism
or choose to remain as Christians, or wandered from place to place, changing
language, culture, religion and identity as they did so—as members of one
“nation”, a naçio.
What did
they mean by naçio? In asking this question, we need to keep in
mind two factors. The first is how and
why we frame this question, a question which signals our own problem with a
term (nation) that has swerved in the
course of recent history to mean something—or a range of things—very different
from what was meant prior to the eighteenth century (when it covered an array
of political concerns related to the emergence of nation-states) and especially
the nineteenth century (when the term shifted again to take on more biological
and racial significance), and thus our own reaction to and against these
meanings. The second is how and why the Sephardim in the early modern period
should have used this term, naçio,
and thus what it meant to them and what they may have assumed it meant to the
various “nations” (goyim) among whom
they lived in various degrees of persecution and toleration.
After
all, as Nikos Chrysolaras suggests, the normal practice when discussing the
early formative types of nationalism as a discourse or discursive system is to
begin with a set of relatively contingent exclusions, i.e., if one is this (for instance, a Belgian or a
Frenchman) one is not that (for
instance, a German or an Italian); if your mother tongue is this (for instance, Catalan or
Galician), you cannot be that (for
instance, a Castilian or a Basque), if you belong to this church (for instance, Greek Orthodox or Coptic), you cannot be
that (for instance, a Roman Catholic
or a Lutheran) and so on.[5] Though there were occasional problematic grey
areas, leakages and small groups of deliberately perverse people who insisted
on using the word “nation” for a people that did not “deserve”[6]
to have a state of their own (e.g., the Kurds or the Dalmatians), the pattern
in the nineteenth century and even through the 1930s was fairly fixed and
accepted in determining who among all the varied peoples in Europe would and
who would not be recognized as distinct nations.
But the
situation of the Sephardic Jews who identified themselves as the naçio was quite different from any of
these examples for at least the following five reasons:
1.
Membership in the Sephardic
Jewish nation did not depend on geography, language or religious confession.
2.
Membership in the naçio also did not and was not supposed
to exclude the individual or family from also being identified by a
geographical or political notion of a state,
3.
By a single mother-tongue
or set of languages appropriate to other recognizable national entities, or
4.
By affiliation and identity with one or more
religious systems.
5.
The members of this nation
did not seek recognition either internationally or locally by non-members, and
there were no particular rights expected to accrue other than from within the
group itself
For this last reason, there may also be
another interesting point to keep in mind:
6.
Whatever the Sephardim may
have meant to say to each other in using this term and whatever it may have
been meant to signal to the goyim who
they had to protect or ingratiate themselves with at various moments in their
dealings with the outside world, there could be other meanings that the
Sephardim were unaware of.
Some of
these unconscious “meanings”—they can hardly have been rational, strategic
signals—may reveal much deeper anxieties and fears in their position than those
they could address as individuals, families and communities while still
embedded in the Lands of Idolatry and throughout their dispersion into the
relatively more tolerant Christian and Islamic lands they came to inhabit.
More than that, however, is still another point which we shall emphasize
in this paper because it is so different from the concepts and categories we
use in our own contemporary world:
7.
Instead of seeing
themselves as a people composed of tightly connected families spread throughout
many countries and continents, a religious fraternity or a business network,
all of which they can be partly be considered, the Sephardim were a naçio because they all were bound by
covenantal relationship, a charter of Jewish law.
In
particular, whereas most of the nation-states that were honed or cobbled
together in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rose from situations of
external threat or perceived occupation by foreign powers, the “other” whose
otherness defines the “identity” or sameness of the individuals and groups
constituting the emergent nation, the Sephardim did not seek a separate state
existence or a purification (“ethnic purifying”) of the national territory,
that is, a place in which the historical roots of the nation can be found and
through which the people (“folk”) connect themselves to the shared “blood” by
this very rootedness.
Historically,
then, Sephardim (both in their hidden status as Crypto-Jews or Marranos and in
their existence among the other nations, including other Jewish groups, such as
Ashkenazim, Jeudeo-Arabs, etc.) did not seek a place of their own in
geographical terms.[7] They
did not define themselves as the people who can, as individuals and families,
keep shifting their homeland, mother-tongue and religious identity, although
this is how they often lived, worked and sought marital partners. For other nations, born of conflict and
separation from the oppressive other, freeing themselves from all those
qualities and aspects of character that, on the one hand, seemed—in a delusion
of false consciousness—to identify them with others or that, on the other,
prevented them from realizing what they really had in common, shared by history
and culture and through a natural tongue. Thus, diverse social classes,
regional customs, and dialectical peculiarities have to merge into one national
organism for the people to recognize that they are a single nation, with the
others who previously shared the labors of the land and the productions of the
specific crafts in the commercial and industrial activities of the city now
rejected as foreign and corrupting; the innovative and cosmopolitan traditions
that created multi-cultural and multi-lingual richness for all are now felt as
asphyxiating vapors that destroy the natural growth of the national identity; and
the variations in speech and the diversity of literary expression are now
experienced as alien and intrusive.
Sephardim, however, relish the diversity, multiple layers of culture,
and the fertile mixture of linguistic soils.
In the
wake of the breakdown of the Latin-Christian synthesis we call the Middle
Ages—that is, in the beginnings of the early Modern Peirod, that used to be
known as Renaissance and Reformation, the Sephardim moved out of their long
ancestral homes on the Iberian Peninsula, out into the wider Mediterranean,
Levantine, Ottoman and Slavic realms. And when the rest of Western Europe and
its New World territories were moving into the Enlightenment and the Romantic
periods, with their concept of increased responsibility of the individual—and
the new definition of an internalized morality based on faith, if spiritual,
and good intentions, if secular,[8]
Judaism shifted more suddenly from the medieval mentality to that opf the
modern: without a Renaissance or a Reformation.
Jews, both Sephardimn and Ashkenazim, looked outward (rather than
leaving behind) from the Torah’s Prophets and rabbinical discourses in Talmud
and Responsa to new ways of
perceiving, engaging with, evaluating and attempting to change the world. Rather than internalization of their
sensibioities and the formation of indivifdualistic concepts of behavious, Jews
still required the community itself to articuylarte, srtudy and apply the Law
of Moses. New Jewish family and community bonds, however
constituted in secular terms or to whatever degree of dependence on surrounding
secular or ecclesiastical overlords, remained the basis of a collective
commitment to justice. To affect that
justice (tzedekeh) in such a way that
it brings about the perfection of the world (tikkun ha-olam) the community must enforce a set of religious
duties (mitzvoth) through education
and strict monitoring of all members of the kehilah. In other words, the performance of moral
deeds—care of the sick and the dying, the mourners and the impoverished,
provision of public amenities and ethical conduct in the public sphere and in
dealing with non-Jewish authorities—was considered a legal obligation, and its
performance taught and reviewed. Nevertheless,
whereas in the Eastern domains, under Slavic and Orthodox Christian rule,
Yiddish-speaking Jews found themselves isolated and persecuted, and thus turned
inwards in the sense of turning away from political or social engagement with
their neighbours, in the West and Southwestern realms and in the circum-Mediterranean
countries, Sephardim remained more open to cultural and intellectual
influences—in southern France, on the Mediterreranean islands, in parts of the
Balkans and other Ottoman lands, and even in certain enclaves of North Africa.
[1] Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso,
Canto Quarto, 1Opere, ed. Adriano
Seroni. Milano:
U. Mursia, n.d.
[2] Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy
of Orlando): A Romantic Epic by Ludovico Arisoto, Part One, Canto IV, Stanza 1, p. 178. trans. Barbara Reynolds. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
[3] — Eva
Alexandra Uchmany, La vida entre el
judaísmo y el cristianismo en la Nueva España, 1580-1606 (México: Archivo
General de la Nación/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992) p. 161.
[4] I have chosen to use the term metaphor here rather than definition because unlike the usual
discussions on nationality what is
primary to Sepharidc identity
(another word laden with great problematics attached to it) does not involve in
the primary instance either political or
territorial or inclusiveness or exclusiveness but rather historical,
cultural, social and spiritual matters, and also must centre on psychological
development and subtle diplomatic skills when dealing with intersecting
otherness both Jewish and non-Jewish.
For a good overview of the prob lems, see Andrew Behrendt, “A Primer on
Nation and Nationalism with Identity Questions of its Own,” review of Ireneusz
Pawel Karolewski and Andrezej Marcin Suszycki, eds., The Nation and Nationalism in Europe: An Introduction (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2011) on
H-Nationalism, H-Reviews (June 2013) online at
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=39259
[5] Let me anticipate the direction this essay will eventually go in. I cite here a passage from Didi-Huberman
about Freud while he was studying with Charcot at the Salpêtriêre studying
hysteria: “Freud never stopped asking
himself this question (the existence of this [ça] or that*): a critical question whwre hysteria is concerned, for
it formulates the paradox of evidence.
Freud said that the most striking characteristic of hysteria is that is
governed by ‘active yet unconscious’ ideas, and that it is, in fact. The
efficiency of a ‘dramatic reproduction’: facticity, the paradox of desire in
rep[resentation, in wjhich the hysteric puts
on view, and even acts out,
exactly rthat which she cannot accomplish” Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and thre
Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtriêre, trans, Alisa Hartz (Cambrdige,
MA and London: MIT Press, 1982) p. 78. The translator’s note is also
provocative: “*[The French term ça
commonly signifies ‘this,’ but is also used to translate the Freudian Es, rendered in English as the
‘id.’” How the identity, self-proclaimed
and externally-imposed, ans well as denied in certain formulations, comes to be
like the Sepahrdic naçio will be more
mysterious than anything yet said or seen or thought about the Crypto-Jews,
Marranos and Jewish Portugue-Spanish “nation”.
[6] The question of who could or could not deserve to have a national state
was thrashed out bitterly during the Versailles Talks after World War I in the
wake of the break-up of various multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-religious
empires; concepts left hanging since the Concert of Europe and the post-1848
treaties were now re-ipened formnally, and to the victors beolonged the spoils.
[7] Except like all Jews, they dreamed and prayed for a return to the Land
of Israel and a rebuilding of the Temple (may it be done speedily in our day).
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