As this long
essay comes closer to the heart of the argument, the way in which the Iberian Inquisition
acted as a forerunner of late nineteenth-century psychoanalysis, the historical
circumstances need to be sharpened, new terms have to be introduced, and a set
of concepts refined to provide the intellectual lens through which to see these
phenomena.
More Definitions and Distinctions
Yet in another sense, these rival concepts of
secrecy and discovery were also dynamic systems of social-construction and
personal-revelation in regard to remnants of the Sephardic communities in Spain
and Portugal. Insofar as the themes,
images, and activities of text and counter-text—that is, two or more versions
of a truth that jockey for position or seek balance in juxtaposition—manifested
themselves, the concepts or conceits formed part of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Baroque culture in which the fusion of incongruous, uncoordinated, and
discontinuous modes of being could be celebrated as elaborate and ingenious
conceits, grotesque collocations and emblems, or anamorphic plays (including
stage plays) on perspective[1] and paronomasia[2].
In the figure of anamorphosis, wherein scenes and bodies are elongated, distorted,
and foreshortened, there developed an optic through which we can now attempt to
discern the actual shape and content of what then constituted inquisitorial
secrecy in the sense of profound shifts in mentality—changes often too subtle
to register on the consciousness of the individuals and the groups involved in
the process. In this way, other social
and psychological tensions, which seemed utterly incompatible or unendurable,
could play themselves out in secret—unconsciously, as they were articulated
into one of numerous anti-texts, the existence of which, when brought to
conscious awareness, threatened the viability of the other as a legitimate,
emotionally-satisfying matrix of identity..
These anti-texts, I want to argue, were possible and endurable only
because they were perceived in anamorphosis
and thereby not read at all or misread as threatening counter-texts; so
that each side in the game of inquisitor versus suspected heretic, on the one
hand, recognized the historical substantiality of the other, though, on the
other, denying theological validity, that is, ultimate reality, to its rival.
In this last sense of mirror-distortions, two
different—not always opposite and incompatible—pictures or narratives of self
and society jockey for position and are precariously juxtaposed. But the deformations and concealments may
have also hidden those aspects of each text which made them more than viable or
unviable alternatives. This when
simplistic antitheses break down and superficial notions of irony as sarcasm
fall apart. The situation was far more
subtle, nuanced in its balances or pseudo-balances, and complex, with often
only minor distinctions or distortions pretending to be mirror-reflections of
one another. This is where, too,
concepts such as clinamen[3] and antonomasia[4] come into their
own.
They could also be text and anti-text, in the
sense that those aspects of the manifest appearance of one and the other
constitute only part of their full expression, a significant part or most of
which could neither be seen by the other or fully realized by the self; but
which, if allowed to move out of the shadows or the silence that masked them,
their mutual fullness would cancel out or destroy at least one of the
textualities altogether. At a more
nuanced level, the images that seem to reflect back upon one another with
hostility are actually very close in specific details or patterns of
relationship: the small differences nevertheless are sufficient to cancel out
the essential identity of each, leaving only a very thin shimmery or shadowy
essence that can barely be discerned from either side of the looking-glass.
Moreover, any juxtaposition into a so-called
metaphysical conceit or stretching out of shape into a virtually unrecognizable
configuration always risked, at the moment when playfulness and witty
conceptualizing ended, cracking apart or losing touch with the vital point of
game-enhancement. These anti-texts did
not only seek to occupy completely the space of consciousness and cultural
plenitude of the other, but above all to eradicate any rivals. However, in the processes of this struggle,
they also created the conditions in which their own self-professed identity was
transformed into a condition of illogic and unacceptability. Hence the secrecy--the silence and
visibility—of the Inquisition in its dealings both with the heresies and
perversions it sought to cleanse and exclude from Christian society was, on the
one hand, a disguise, to itself as well as to society at large, of its
anti-Christian reality; and the other, it was a form of collective national
madness that it shared with the rest of society insofar as Iberian society
permitted the Holy Office to exist and helped it to function.
At the same time, when the Holy Office sought
to expose by secret means the concealed Jewishness of the Judaizers it arrested, intimidated and tortured, the Inquisition in
fact created new kinds of Jews where no conscious (practicing) Jews had existed
before or could exist in the aftermath or wake of the Inquisition’s
persecutions and threats of torture; and, when it belatedly recognized this
secret or at least had some inkling of its presence, it could only attempt to
destroy these judaizantes before they had a chance to express anything
but the heretical “Dead Law of Moses” modelled on inquisitorial instruction.
The physical, as well as spiritual annihilation of these grotesque and mad
forms of Judaism seemed necessary by the zealots and fanatics to avoid
recognizing how grotesque and insane the Inquisition itself was. However, simultaneously, the Judaizers who learned to be some form of
Crypto-Jews—we call them Marranos in
a strict sense[5]—from the interrogations and
instructions of the friars and other agents appointed by the Holy Office to
force the accused to confess to their heresy and renounce it in favour of a
penitential rebirth as Christians, made disturbingly evident—in a manner that
had to remain secret to the outside world and to the inquisitors
themselves—that their own religious tradition was informed by Jewish roots and
concepts, however much distorted or denied.
Should an accused Judaizer be convinced by the inquisitors that he or she was a
heretic and to seek through penitence reconciliation to the Church, that return
to the one true faith involved a procedural acceptance, too, of the need to
repress any public statement of having passed through this process. What happened in the secret processes and in
the torture chambers of the Holy Office would always have to remain concealed,
so that, in this distortion of Christian love and forgiveness, the Catholic
faith was compromised, the Spanish or Portuguese identity deformed, and the
individual’s sincerity of penitence made suspect again. It would have been unlikely anything other
than fear of consequences of not reconciling oneself to the Church and
therefore of being subject to the very processes denied—the threats and
practice of torture—could have convinced individuals to seek penance: such a
desire to be a reconciliado meant betrayal of one’s neighbours, friends,
and family, of one’s faith in the mercy of the Christian God or the justice of
the Jewish Law, and of oneself as a competent, rational and trustworthy person.
In particular, the circumstances of this
suspicion and anxiety around and within the family places the child and his or
her relationship with parents in a most invidious situation. This occurs in two main ways. First adults cannot rely on the discretion of
a young son or daughter to guard the family secret, and hence these boys and
girls are excluded from the most strategic intimacies of the family. It often happens that only one child is
deemed worthy—trustworthy, strong enough and capable of mature self-control, to
be entrusted with the knowledge of the secret Judaism practiced and believed in
at home. Among the other siblings, some
are set apart as sacrifices, as it were, by being sent for training as priests
or entered into monastic life as monk or nun, this in itself causing further
difficulties, in that certain children are aware of the family secret and use
their position within the Church also as a protecting and espionage role, while
others are evicted from the household as a means of ensuring their silence and
non-interference in the secret Judaic life of the family. The second factor making children crucial to
the Marrano or Crypto-Jewish experience lies in the Inquisition’s attempt to undermine
the continuity of Jewish tradition in the family by preying upon childish
innocence and impetuosity. Not only are
small children indiscreet in what they say directly or inadvertently in the
presence of outsiders, including servants and neighbours, any of whom may be
paid familiares (informants) or unpaid malsines (jealous
neighbours, rival businessmen, greedy passers-by who serve as spies). Older children endanger the family by
incautious boasts or taunts among their playfellows and rebellious adolescents
may denounce their siblings or parents out of spite.[6]
These tension-ridden circumstances make it difficult for a traditional Jewish
family, with its child-reading practices based on emotional interference and
caring, to be sustained. Partly, to
construct the image of Iberian normality, boys and girls are chastised, often
violently, so servants and visitors do not become suspicious. Partly, to maintain strict discipline in the
home, rigid codes of difference between parent and child, sister and brother,
and husband and wife are asserted, again breaking down the unquestioned bonds
of the mishpucha (family warmth and closeness) and shalom b’beyit
(peace in the home through avoidance of quarrels and external tensions). Partly, too, given the stress occasioned by
virtually constant role-playing and duplicity, fathers and mothers become
distraught and lash out irrationally at each other and their offspring.
Ecclesiastical agents, many of them by the
fourteenth and fifteenth century already conversos or the inheritors of
such traditions and therefore fearful of the suspicion that would fall on them
in delicate situations and eager to project guilt on to others, knew that the
most vulnerable place to confront Jews was through their children. Centuries of persecution had inculcated
Jewish parents into the need to protect, educate and love their infants and
toddlers with a sustained intensity mostly unknown in other cultures—and when
perceived by the non-Jewish society felt as a threat to their own repressed
sense of abandonment and abuse by adult caregivers. Spanish and Portuguese clerics—most often
local monks, friars and low-order priests—sought to exert undue influence on
these secret Jews and suspicious New Christian, to kidnap and forcibly baptise
them, send them to foster them out to Old Christian families or place them in
religious houses. These threats to the
stability of the mishpucha, as we have indicated, created extreme
anxiety in the home.[7] In the most dangerous
circumstances, such as when Jews were rounded up to be baptized under duress or
children dragged away from their parental possession, an anomalous instinct or
normally dormant archaic tradition broke through; mothers or fathers threw
their infants into wells, cut their throats, or enclosed them in acts of collective
suicide. Such scenes are recounted in
chronicles narrating the massing of Jews on the docks in Lisbon in 1497 as soon
as it became clear that these families had not been brought their for expulsion
but for forced conversion and separation of children from parents.[8]
NOTES
[1] In normal modern usage, perspective refers to two things: on the one
hand, it is a way of creating the illusion in two-dimensional drawings or
paintings of depth and distance, to the point of a trompe l’œil, a trick of the eye; on the other hand, perspective
normally means an individual and unique point of view, a private and specific
set of opinions and attitudes about one’s experience of the world. In the transitional state of epistemology in
the period we are looking at, the point of view considered normal, legitimate
or sane was shifting and many people found they could not trust their inherited
and institutionalized truisms, believe their senses accurate and comforting, or
find a steady position from which to look both out outside at the environing
world of normal reality or the inward regions of thought, memory or faith. The Inquisition attempted to impose
standards, monitor deviations and control external influences. Jews forced to convert to escape persecution or
attempting to conform and assimilate into the dominant society by accepting
baptism discovered not only that they could never be fully integrated—they would
always be, even after many generations, New Christians and hence excluded from
public offices and privileges—and at the same time having become separated from
rabbinical social relations, knowledge and feelings, no longer felt at home in
the world.
[2] Paronomasia includes a much wider variety of word-play
than is usually considered in the sense of puns, as can be seen when one examines
the so-called metaphysical wit or witty conceits of the writers of the early
Modern period: poets, essayists and historians, as well as theologians see in
the manipulation of letters, syntax and grammar a way of discovering new,
long-lost and what we would call unconscious meanings in ancient texts, old
pictures and conventional gestures. The
emergence of large-scape duplicity, deception and masking within the society
experiencing the breakdown of the medieval order, that is, the millennium-long
Latin-Christian synthesis of culture, experienced a sense of the world falling
apart and new worlds being discovered in geography, astronomy and microscopic reality. One of the motivations of the Inquisitors was
to root out these previously unseen, unheard and inconceivable aspects of the world
in order to protect the conventionalized (“eternal truths”) of the Church. The great irony of this, of course, is that
what the Holy Office thought they were revealing as subversive in order to
destroy was actually something they were helping to create.
[3] In Epicurean theory, the clinamen is the seemingly unexpected, irrational swerve of atoms,
and thus any bias or tilting away from the normal flow or progression of in a
pattern. In regard to the “fuzzy Jews”
in the range of Marrano behaviour, the concept to be considered has to do with
what seem like single, one-off shifts, twists and turns, breaks and gaps in
continuity, but, over a long period of time (more than three or four
generations) the pattern is once again measurable.
[4] Antonomasia is related to metonym and synecdoche as
different ways of naming, recognizing and alluding to things. In particular, whereas a synecdoche gives a part for the whole (or the whole for the part,
the producer for the produced, etc., in the sense of “wheels” for a whole
automobile or “arms” for the weapons carried by those limbs) and metonym offers one name in place of
another (Washington for the government of the United States, London for the
government of the United Kingdom), antonomasia
generalizes the specific to cover the generic (a note for music or a leaf for a
book and everything written, read and understood on it). These rhetorical figures allow us to conceive
of the Marrano experience as occupying what seems like a particular time and
place in history and professing a characteristic and legal set of beliefs and practices
typical of that specific nationality while at the same time belonging to a
longer and different history, a larger geographical spread of peoples and
ideas, and a significantly different and illegal practice of religion.
[5] That is, to distinguish these people caught in
an amorphous middle position between sincere Christians and secretly believing
Jews. Superficial writers elide the two
terms, Crypto-Jew and Marrano, but there are more than a few distinctions that
make it wise to keep them apart.
Crypto-Jews are people who have made a decision or inherited a
disposition to remain Christian in public acts and professions of faith, while
performing privately and in their inner consciousness the religion of their
Jewish ancestors, however inchoate or fragmented this may be. Marranos—a
disparaging term meaning swine, used sometimes by both professing Jews and
believing New Christians, as well as occasionally, usually in Italy, by the
Inquisition and its familiars—designates individuals and families who are not
sure of their beliefs or their status in relation to the orthodoxies of either
Judaism or Christianity; and consequently, at one extreme, may include people
who find it most meaningful to themselves to play off one of those “persecuting
communities” (as José Faur calls them) against the other and enjoy the thrill
of the vacillation itself; and at the other, those who suffer deep anxieties
and self-doubts throughout their lives. These ideas are expounded at length
with specific examples in Norman Simms Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in
Jewish Experience (New York: Peter Lang Verlag, 2005) and Marranos on the Moradas: Secret Jews and
Penitentes in the Southwestern United States, 1590-1890 (Brighton, MA:
Academic Studies Press, 2008).
[6] See for instance Norman Simms, “Children among
the Marranos: A Psychohistorical Problem” The Queens College Journal of
Jewish Studies vol. VII (Spring
2005) 35-43.
[7] For further discussion and references, see
Norman Simms, “Jewish Childrearing in Pre-Modern Times” in Simms, Windows
on a Jewish World The Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual
Waikato Jewish Studies Seminar, 2003.
(Hamilton: Outrigger Publishers, 2004)
pp. 39-58.
[8] For a particular instance, see 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.
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