The Crypto-Jew as Octopus:
Meditations on an anti-Semitic Image[1]
While there is a reprehensible tradition in modern anti-Semitic
propaganda, whether from Christian or Muslim sources, whether on the Right or
the Left of contemporary politics, to
depict Jews by imagining them to be collectively an octopus, the slander lying
in the analogy between the spider’s web or the octopus’ grasping tentacles in a
world conspiracy of evil, an alternative ancient tradition uses the figure of
the octopus in a more positive light to picture the special kind of wisdom and
cunning known as mētis; and this concept may help us to imagine those anousim
or Jews who were forced to live as a threatened, embattled minority among goyim
or the gentile nations. In
particular, the image of the eight-legged sea creature becomes appropriate when
dealing with the phenomenon of Crypto-Judaism because it is there that many of
the features, considered negative when applied to rabbinical communities and
institutions by Jew haters, become subtle and strategic survival techniques and
the consequences of victimization.
This traditional iconography or hieroglyph of the
octopus is found in ancient Greek literature in regard to mētis before
it becomes associated in a negative sense with any particular group of despised
and feared people, such as the Jews, Crypto-Jews and Marranos[2]. For example, Gregory Nagy points out that in
Odyssey 1.1 the epithet applied to Odysseus, polutrupos, “versatile in
many ways”, actually compares him to an octopus.[3] Robert Fagles’ new translation renders the
term in regard to the hero as “the man of twists and turns.”[4] While there is a great deal in common between
Odysseus as the trickster in this epic and many of the heroes in such books of
the Bible as Judges or Esther and also later with certain types of rabbinical
anti-heroes to be found in Jewish literature, the primary point here is to see
the octopus, with its many tentacled-legs, as a type of polymorphic creature[5]
who both grasps and clings without any thought, merely by instinct. It is a more ambiguous creature, however, one
different from Scylla, for instance: a monstrous barking, many legged and
many-headed beast who lives in a cave above the sea and preys on passing
mariners; for Scylla’s grasping and clinging is completely malicious in
character.
The same word and image of the octopus also appears in
the poetry of Theognis where the Greek poet comments on the characteristics of
the beast in order to extrapolate its metaphoric significance. The ancient author
thus gives to the creature an aphoristic existence beyond its metaphorical
role:
Have the temperament of a complex octopus, who
looks like
whatever rock with which he is associated [prosomileō].
Now be like this; then, at another time, become
different in your coloring.
I tell you:
skill [sophiā] is better than
being not versatile [atropos].
(215-218)
This image is also used again in Homer’s epic at Odyssey
5.432-434. Unlike the epithet of polutropos
that tends to attach itself to Odysseus throughout the narrative, at this point
the octopus itself is examined for its metaphoric and aphoristic meanings; and
significantly this time the comparison goes beyond the individual trickster
hero to enfold itself in the generic form of the ainos, a speech-act of
authority which is the expression of the polis or city as “multiple,
outwardly ever-changing” because the poet who embodies in his person this
expression “moves from city to city” and is “like the disguised Odysseus who
tests the inner value of the many different people whom he meets in his
travels.” What Nagy says further in
regard to this usage of the octopus is much to the point of my argument in
regard to the development of a modern European personality first revealed among
the Jews, or rather those vague, fuzzy and confused Jews of Iberia in the
fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, and thus it may put a new slant—a
positive, rather than a negative and anti-Semitic slant—on the image that
develops of the Jew as a kind of octopus with his tentacles engirdling the
world. Nagy writes:
Each person who is encountered by Odysseus
after his homecoming in Ithaca is effectively being challenged to look beyond
the hero’s outer appearance as a debased beggar and to recognize his inner
reality as a noble king whose authority is eventually being reestablished in
the Odyssey, a process that parallels the eventual reconstitution of the
very identity of Odysseus through a series of encounters with the population of
Ithaca. The ainos is also singular, inwardly constant, bearing a true
message that is hidden amidst a plethora of possible false interpretations.[6]
But there are several deeper and occluded
questions hidden inside Nagy’s comments.
Rich as the remarks are in suggestions about the way Odysseus operates
and the Odyssey works as an epic poem, the notion of twisting and turning in
order to fit into a hostile world, or at least in an ambiguous and dangerous
society, goes beyond the notion of the sea creature as grasping and
clinging.
More than
Proteus also a creature who shape-shifts prodigiously but whose protean
character, first of all does not engage with a world of changing circumstances
in order to gain advantage in a defensive or offensive manner, and, second of
all, has no specific moral or ethical or psychological dimension to it,[7]
polytropos Odysseus is a model of the cunning intelligence the Greeks
called mētis: a form of practical, strategic wisdom that comes into play
to deal with shifting circumstances and the elusive nature of opponents.[8]
Hence here, contrary
to the negative stereotyping evident in nineteenth and twentieth-century
anti-Semitic slanders, the octopus comes to stand for the Jew as perceived by a
Classical or Christian civilization that is profoundly troubled by the presence
of otherness and especially the unwillingness of the Hebrew to assimilate into
Greek, Roman, or Christian institutionalized categories of social existence.[9] Those very qualities of duplicity, deceit,
and wiliness that are necessary for survival and protection are precisely what
seem dangerous and subversive to the hegemonic powers—or to those cultural
groups grasping after security of faith and power, all the while they feel deep
anxieties about their own social status and doctrines of belief. More than
that, as happened in the early Modern Period, when the Catholic Church felt
itself vulnerable to attacks from the rising tide of Protestantism, the very
conditions it imposed on the mass of conversos—the Spanish and
Portuguese Jewish converts to Christianity—seemed like an infectious, polluting
enemy within its own body politic.
For it is not
just a matter of a hero such as Odysseus being polutropos against the atropos
of his enemies in Ithaca and elsewhere, but the way in which his deception and
concealment differs from those of the individuals, groups, and forces ranged
against him during his journey home (nostos), including his wanderings (errores)
through many strange islands of the mind on his way back to Ithaca. Odysseus’ versatility is certainly a skill, technē,
and therefore not only the form of wisdom, sophiā, that Nagy
suggests. It is also a technique that
among the Jews can be learned through example at home, taught in schools and
practiced in the marketplace in the context of an internalized moral belief. In other words, what for Homer’s Odysseus is
a survival skill that perhaps inadvertently also constructs a more complex
inner-self that is not to be seen in the Iliad or most other early classical
texts is in the Jewish experience among the nations—in the lengthy exile or
Galut that is often accompanied by discrimination, persecution, expulsion and
massacre, as well as forced conversions—also a construction of elaborate
techniques for developing new historical realities for the group. For the conversos, the need for such
duplicity, disguise and witty innuendo is even more pressing, so much so, it
effectively defines the identity that is necessarily hidden. In other words, the Marrano must be
considered more than a Jew secretly (and slyly) or a former Jew incompletely
(and inadequately) trying to believe him or herself a good Catholic living
inside the mask of a New Christian: but a new kind of creature altogether.
Wisdom in the
early Hellenic sense is on the way to becoming the profound moral and perhaps even
spiritual quality that Plato will accord the term, particularly as argued by
Socrates and Diotima in the Symposium.
It is the love of wisdom, sophiā, the desire for what is lacking,
that marks philosophy as the preeminent occupation of the truly wise man. However, in Homer’s epic poem, wisdom is
probably closer to the darker side of life—to cunning, metīs, with its
concomitant senses of deceit, trickery and concealment, which is why there is
always an underlying quality of anti-social and subversive criminality about
its use in pre-philosophical contexts.
The later classical usage of wisdom (Sophia or Sapientia) implies strongly a condition of the soul, a moral
position reached through stages of preparatory education, to be sure, but not
something that can be learned without a total commitment to a specific way of
life, the way of the philosopher. Cunning
intelligence, however, in Detienne and Vernant’s words,
instead of contemplating unchanging
essence, is directly involved in the difficulties of practical life with all
its risks, confronted with a world of hostile forces which are disturbing because
they are always changing and ambiguous.
Mētis—intelligence which operates in the world of becoming, in
circumstances of conflict—takes the form of an ability to deal with whatever
comes up, drawing on certain intellectual qualities: forethought perspicacity,
quickness and acuteness of understanding, trickery, and even deceit.[10]
Whether or not later writers, such as
Oppian, were aware of the Homeric use of mētis as a third mode of wisdom
alongside philosophy and sophistry, these authors of late classical texts on
hunting saw the same terminology used in ancient epics as appropriate to
descriptions of hunting and fishing—and to the analogies they drew to
contemporary imperial politics with all its intrigue (and what would much later
be known as Machiavellianism).[11]
As the concept
is adapted to the Jewish and especially after 1390 for Sephardim the
Crypto-Jewish condition, however, it becomes something other than a strategy
for rulers to use in controlling political or military opponents or for rebels
and pretenders to manipulate in winning seats of power for themselves. Neither
a cynical ploy by ambitious would-be world-controllers nor a romantic
subversion by “good people” from within the sanctuary of evil, mētis emphasizes
patience, caution, and vigilance in order to gain influence behind the scenes.[12] The otherwise disenfranchised Jew and the
desperately disguised New Christian seek a position of seeming usefulness or
skill that weighs against forces that seek to expel or destroy them per se. Hence they seek to deflect any notion of
actual power that would frighten those who actually wield political,
ecclesiastical or military might. The polytropos
creature pretends to be useful but not ambitious, to be clever but not
domineering, and to be loyal but not threatening to the regime that rules.
Where the
enemies of Israel in Exile see the image of the octopus as grasping and
invading all parts of the body politic, the Jew imagines himself as seeking to attain what Vernant and
Detienne describe as “the infinite
suppleness of its tentacles… [which] symbolizes the unsiezability that comes
from polymorphy.”[13]
In this way,
turning back to the classical example, Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca Ithaca
My son, associate with all the various
cities by making your mind [noos] resemble, most of all the
coloring of the animal who lives in the sea, clinging to rocks. Have on your mind different things at
different times, being ready and willing for the occasion to make ainos
[= verb ep=aineō].
Pindar F 43 SM[15]
In this passage, Pindar describes the
nature of polutropos as an octopus as an animal which associates itself
with rocks, clinging to them, and, as Oppian points out, its mechanē
“enables it to merge with the stone to which it clings.”[16] Pindar makes his analogy at the point of the
similarity of mind with sea creature.
The young man is advised by his father to “have on your mind different
things”. It is the mind, noos,
that is like an octopus, not the external appearance and actions, except one
specific action: making ainos.
Hence Nagy says “We see in the symbol of the octopus the very essence of
ainos.”
The
formal simile in Odyssey 5. 432-433—“An octopus, when you drag one from his
chamber, comes up with suckers full of tiny stones”—needs to be set in its
immediate and larger contexts to be properly understood. Ffinally released from
nearly ten years forced exile on Kalypso’s island of Ogygia Ithaca
Gripped a rock-ledge with both hands in
passing
and held on, groaning, as the surge went
by,
to keep clear of its breaking. Then the backwash
hit him, ripping him under and far out.
An octopus, when you drag one from his
chamber,
comes up with suckers full of tiny stones:
Odysseus left the skin of his great hands
torn on that rock-ledge as the waves
submerged him.
and now at last Odysseus would have
perished,
battered inhumanly, but he had the gift
of self-possession from grey-eyed Athena.
So, when the backwash spewed him up again,
he swam out and along, and scanned the
coast
for some landspit that made a breakwater.[17]
The analogy to a Sephardic Jew or Marrano
clinging to life in the midst of relentless persecution is profound. Over more than four hundred years, the polytropon
Jew in the mask of a New Chiostian depended not on the compassionate wisdom
of Lady Holy Church
In an essay on
Christopher Columbus, Franz J. Katz reports[18]
the early twentieth-century Spanish cultural historian Salvador de Madriaga
describing Columbus’s persistent effort to conceal his origin and past:
Like the squid, he oozes out a cloud of ink
round every hard square fact of his life.
This ink, multiplied by the industry of historians, has made but blacker
and thicker the mystery which attaches to him.[19]
The similarity to the passages in Homer and
Theogonis we have cited earlier lies too close for comfort. Madriaga’s comment appears too exact to be a
mere accident, particularly when what it is that Columbus
Similar
to Odysseus, the hero who odyssean or suffers his epic ordeal, one of
the ideal types of the early Modern Age is also a man of anguish and a great
deal of pessimism. In its Baroque form,
such a troubled modern personality differs from the magnificence and optimism
of the earlier Renaissance ideals, and confronts a world that is often hostile,
unyielding to human effort, and cynically devoid of real principles. At the same time as the converso or
Marrano personality (though they are not exact synonyms) takes shape in
the shadow of the Inquisition and the confusions of other modern institutions
of persecution established by centralizing national states, the Baroque ideal
conceives of “life as a struggle” against the stultifying conventions of
society and of a need to devise strategies to negotiate the complexities of the
new world.
Unlike
Odysseus, however, whose strategic thinking and deft capacity for disguises,
aided by Athena, keeps him strong, healthy and eminently sane in times of
confusion, the Marrano often operates against social and intellectual forces
that keep him weak, off-balance, and on the cusp of melancholia, like the
archetype of the marked other, the Man of La Mancha, Don Quixote. Thus, where the Greek notion of mētis
operates best in situations of combat, hunting, and political debate, the
Jewish notion of seychel—or rather the Crypto-Jewish manifestation of
this quickness of mind—is constantly responding to real or impending dangers,
retreating, shifting position, prevaricating and temporizing. It is not a matter, as some historians have
put it, of the Marrano being usually a Sephardic “Jew-in-waiting”—waiting for an opportunity
to return to rabbinical communities and the open practice of the mitzvoth—but,
instead, of seeking to live precariously inside the hostile Iberian environment
because that environment is seen to offer more opportunities than the closed,
defensive, increasingly aggressive conservatism (“orthodoxy”) of the
reconstituted rabbinical cultures beyond the Catholic Empires of Spain and
Portugal and their overseas domains. In other words, rather than seeking
spiritual or pastoral withdrawal from the business of the courts and cities,
the new personality type—the octopus—constructs pragmatic strategies: how to
make friends and influence people.[20] The
closed society of rabbinical Judaism, often stigmatized as premised on
Ashkenazi pilpul and epistemological rigidity, seems at this time to be
cut off from, not just the traditional culture, arts, and ideals of Spain and
Portugal—with all their hidalgo splendor and colorful emotions—but also from
participation in the awakened classical learning of the Renaissance and the New
Science of the Enlightenment. This is, of
course, ironic because the glorious dream of Iberian transcendence appears at
the very time when Spain and
Portugal divorce themselves
increasingly from these artistic and intellectual currents and which are in
reality best realized in the secularizing, rationalizing lands of Western Europe .
In one of the
most popular books of the seventeenth century by a suspected Crypto-Jew, Baltasar
Gracián (1601-1658), El arte de la prudencia[21]
a programme for behaviour is set out that requires wit and prudence, an
acceptance of the complexities and ambiguities of the world, and the
expectation of changes of circumstance and the loss of prestige and
dignity. In this handbook for the
realistic but ambitious reader, the author of New Christian heritage, sets out
a way of life that will be picked up and developed by others, such as La
Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère. This way
of life turns on two factors: first, the constant awareness of the difference
between appearance and reality, and therefore of the need to play and create
appearances that protect and advance the reality of the person seeking
advancement in this world; and second, the primacy of conversation as the
setting, vehicle and substance of a protected inner-self. Prudence means keeping oneself aware of who
and what one is and wants to be, where and how one must operate, and what
effects and consequences one’s words, gestures and general deportment have on
others—the others whose possession of wealth, titles, and power determines
one’s own success or lack of it in the world.
NOTES
[1] I wrote this essay for some journal or conference, but do not
believe it was ever published or that I ever attended a meeting to read
it. Some of the ideas and perhaps a few
paragraphs eventually made it into my books on Crypto-Judaism and
Marranos. Now after retrieving it from
the depths of my computer and after a little editorial tweaking, it is time to
expose it to the eyes of loyal readers.
I also take the opportunity of inserting some illustrations.
[3] Gregory Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore and London: The
John Hopkins University Press, 1990) p. 425.
[5] Marcel Detienne and
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society,
trans, Janet Lloyd (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991) p. 2.
[6] Nagy, Pindar’s Homer pp. 425-426.
[9] I put aside the speculations of Robert Graves who sees the
transformations and shape-shifting phenomenon as part of a calendrical
symbolisn from Pindar to Tzetzes; see The White Goddess: A Historical
Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber & Faber, 1961; rev. and enlarged
ed.) p. 277, n. 1.
[10] Detienne and Vernant, Cunning Intelligence, p. 44.
[12] [12] José Faur often argues that mētis is the very opposition of rabbinical wit and intelligence,
seeing it as the marker of classical and pagan duplicity and deceit. My
argument sees this form of ancient cunning not only as the key to the
personality of the Secret Jew during and after the Iberian crisis of faith, but
as Shmuel Trigano and several others have noted as a core feature of Jewishness
when it is forced to live in a hostile, non-Jewish world; see Norman Simms, Marranos
on the Moradas: Secret Jews and Penitentes in the Southwestern United States,
1590-1890 (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2008).
[14] One needs to recall
here that Athena sprang from the head of Zeus as a manifestation of those
qualities which make Zeus himself a master of counsel, cunning, and strategy,
and that Zeus had not only married Mētis to ingest her powers and thus absorb
them into his own but also to prevent her from bearing children, whether by him
or another deity, whose strengths would eventually challenge his sovereignty as
he had that of his own father Saturn.
[15] Nagy, Pindar’s Homer
p. 424.
[17] Robert Fitzgerald, trans. The Odyssey p. 369.
[18] Franz J. Katz, “Nonsense about Columbus
[19] Salvador de Madriaga, Christopher Columbus, Being the Life of
the Very Magnificent Lord Don Cristobal Colon (New York: MacMillan, 1940),
cited in Katz, “Nonsense about Columbus
[20] José Ignacio Diez Fernández,
“Introducción”, Baltasar Gracián, El Arte de la Prudencia: Oráculo manual
(Madrid: Ediciones Temas de Hoy, 1993) p. x.
[21] Original title: Oráculo manual y arte
de prudencia.
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