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.