The Nation Part 2

Search for National Symbols
and Myths

Etre Juif, cela ne veut donc pas dire être de la même religion.  Je sais bien qu’on affirme communément le contraire et qu’on affecte de considérer comme ne faisant pas partie d’Israël tous ceux qui ne fréquentent pas les synagogues.[1]

To be a Jew does not mean to belong to the same religion.  I well know that usually they say the opposite and that they try to think that those who do not attend synagogue are not part of Israel.

At the same time when the familiar nations of Europe (e.g., France, England, Spain) moved from feudal and other medieval state-formations began to constitute themselves into centralized monarchies, others remained in fragmentary geographical conglomerates (e.g., Germany, Italy).  But which peoples considered themselves to be a nation and on what grounds?  The nation-state is only partly defined by drawing a line around a specific area and deciding that everyone within it ought to speak the same language, worship the same religious way, and share an ancestral tie with the soil itself.   Something else was needed but even when there were common myths, symbols and political ideals not every group qualified as a state or a nation.  There could therefore be competing systems of belief to draw lines of exclusion and exclusion around the incipient nationalities, such as French, Spanish or Greek.  Legends of historical continuity would be then manufactured to bolster these varying ideologies, often with newly invented roots in what would be termed folklore.

The problem would remain as to what to do with those within the magic circle of nationality who did not conform: they could be expelled, annihilated, forced to convert and assimilate—learn the national language, worship in the national church, where the national clothes and participate in national events, such as war.  What seemed to make Jews most dangerous was that they often tried to do all those things, but still remained different. `There was something about them that smelled bad, often literally.  In Iberia, even if hudndeds of years lay between the time of an ancestor’s conversion and your own life, you and all your family were considered New Christians, and that newness was untrustworthy five generations later as it was on the day of the original baptism.  Jewishness was ineradicable and Jewishness was a pollutant or a cancer in the body politic, as well as in the corpus christi.

As we have shown in the headnote (to Part 1 of this essay) from Eva Alexandra Uchmany, when the New Christians of Portugal—most if not all of them refugees from the persecuitions, massacres and expulsions in Spain—tried to bargain (bribe) the papal authorities (and the Pope himself) not to establish an Inquisition in Portugal, or if it was inevitable, then at least to delay it as long as possible and mitigate its worst aspects, not only did the Sephardim identify themselves as homens de la naçio, but that is how the great churchmen spoke of them: men of the nation.  As we shall see, this was not an inevitable or natural way of speaking about conversos, New Christians, Marranos, neofites or followers of the Dead Law of Moses.  But it was, under the circumstances, an apt expression, best suited to the conditions of the time and the self-image of the individuals and families involved in this desperate attempt to save their lives and fortunes.  We will also show that there is a deep-seated historical reason within Judaism for this way of speaking of themselves, and that it is an important indicator of their adherence to rabbinical law in the tradition of Maimonidean rationalism.

For the Sephardim in general, to distinguish themselves primarily from other Jews—the Ashkenazim, as well as the ancient Levantine and Arabic communities they began to encounter in their Diaspora from Iberia after 1492—and not just from non-Jewish states and anomalous Jewish jurisdictions (e.g. Khazars and a few south Saharan city-states), religions and ethnicities: they, like other peoples beginning to conceive of themselves as a modern nation, searched for appropriate symbols, myths and economic ideals.  This creative enterprise, partly conscious and partly unconscious, had both a regressive tendency, insofar as it idealized the glories of the Iberian past—the Golden Age of El Andalus—with a stress on honor, refinement and cultural achievement, and a radically progressive tendency, insofar as make a sharper break with the feudal, ecclesiastical and linguistic past: the new naçio was not burdened with obligations to the land and archaic crafts, focused on the ethical, legal and mystical interpretation of the religious heritage rather than the ritualistic, allegorical and litteral parsing of texts (pilpul), and expressed itself in a suite of languages and dialects strategically and effectively appropriate to real-world circumstances.

As hinted at in the first section of this essay, there was something very bizarre in its formulation, almost hallucinatory, not quite real in the sense that reality was starting to be thought of by novelists, historians, journalists and bourgeois citizens of secular states.  Whereas anti-Semites, before and after the invention  of the terminology, conceived of Jews as a singular essence: always the same, always aware only being a Jew—locked into the fatuousness of an eternal state that defies all of history’s changes and the historical Jew’s requirement to be at once and different as an individual[2]—the men and women of the naçio had to be born over and over again (become a new, a next, another nation’s generation), from generation to generation, and from one circumstance to another in their own lives, the same to the extent that they remembered who they originally were, where they had shifted to some new projection of identity, and how they could turn again when necessary to some protective version of simulation or dissimulation, temporizing in the whirligig of time and wearing the mask of unchangeableness they hoped would keep them from being subject to interrogation, inquisition, imposition of an unwanted description by the book.[3]]

While it is sometimes said that the development of Lurianic kabbalah is a direct response to the traumatic events of the Iberian crisis among Sephardic Jews, recent studies have shown this to be a major overstatement.  The key features of lurianism—the messianic fervor based on the ideas of tsimtsum and tikkun ha’olam—existed before the profound changes in the position of Jews in Spanish society became evident.  While lurianism came to express certain aspects to the Sabbatean fiasco, as a way of explaining away its most embarrassing and humiliating features. More to the point seems to be the legacy of the Maimonidean controversy.  This ideological struggle between two interpretations of Judaism at once undermined the solid front of the Sephardic community, preparing both sides for strategic and contingent retreats in the face of the massive onslaught against rabbinical authority, and at the same time provided intellectual and emotional ways of coping with the deep splits and weaknesses that followed the crises of the long decade from 1492 to 1506.

This paradoxical combination of pride in archaic Iberian ideals and a hard-headed virtually Machiavellian commitment to the emerging ethic of bourgeois capitalism was made possible by adaptation of traditional Jewish values and heightened family loyalty.  The shared memory of persecution by the Inquisition—and the sense of injustice wrought by a society which had held out the promise of assimilation and freedom from anti-Semitic prejudices—gave to the individuals and families who constituted the nation an impetus to defy the diverse forms of hatred ranged against them in the Lands of Idolatry, in the hypocritical kingdoms of both Catholic and Protestant Europe, and in the seemingly tolerant and welcoming territories under Muslim control.  But how these diverse forces worked together in practice remains to be seen.

However, the homens de la naçio were not ordinary practicing Jews who, having rescued themselves from the trauma of expulsion or even from having escaped at some later point and integrated themselves more or less into existing Sephardic communities around the Mediterranean, the Levant and in the Balkans; they were individuals and families who identified themselves with their own historical experiences of several generations—people who, when they moved from community to community, traded around the world, sent their children out to be married in far-off places, sometimes as Jews, sometimes as nominal Christians, and hence could not pick one of the variations as their own, but only the conglomerate, and the cover-term for this historical experience was men of the nation.

Rather than a state within a state, this Sephardic Nation (meaning not all Jews who originated in Iberia but only those in this special and fluid historical condition of commercial association) is a legal-moral community that crosses state boundaries and other national or religious jurisdictions  It is a form of limited globalism, insofar as the members—individuals, families, commercial enterprises and charitable institutions—consider themselves as more and other than the other legal entities in which they find themselves as unrecognized minorities, marginalized or tolerated if recognized, and depended upon with caution and prudence.

[1] Bernard Lazare, Le nationalisme juif.  Publication de Kademah No. 1 (Paris: Stock et Flammarion & l’Association des Etudiants Israélites Russes,  1898) p. 1.

[2] Lazare, Le nationalisme juif, p. 2

[3] One recalls Archie Bunker’s malapropism in All in the Family when he speaks of the “Spanish Imposition.”