Some speculations on the Modern Marrano Experience

The following paragraphs were pulled from an article I wrote a year ago but which had to be drastically cut down for the specifics of the anthology it was to go in.  Here it is fpr your perusal and comments.

One of the assumed truisms I grew up with in rabbinical Jewish tradition was that any Jew who becomes a Christian does so out of external pressure—threats to the individual or the family, to the community’s continued and its livelihood—or out of selfish ambitions—to open access to professions otherwise closed to Jews, to escape from an oppressive family, or to be free of the charges charged against all Jews which the individual has come to accept.  It was simply inconceivable that a Jew would or could forgo the ancestral religion as a matter of faith or theological preference.  Such a heretic, however, often remains technically—in halacha or rabbinical law—a Jew, albeit a bad one who has separated him- or herself from the community or, which amounts to the same thing, has not taken any opportunity following their baptism or that of parents or grandparents to return to the synagogue as a penitent, a baal teshuva.  In a more historical setting, this came to mean that in the case of Iberian or Sephardic Jews who were subjected to physical, financial and psychological threats by the Spanish or Portuguese Inquisitions or royal administrations to force their conversions each subsequent generation of individuals, families and communities must be seen to face the original question of whether to accept the relief of baptism or to continue in the new condition of a New Christian. 

            It would have been a more complex question in the past or in the present of my own growing to awareness to have discussed the related question of what as the halachic or community status of individuals and families of Jews who did not formally convert to Christianity (or some other religion or organized belief system, such as Ethical Culture or the Communist Party) but simply faded away, or the saying now goes who began to move under the radar.  During the persecutions of the Middle Ages, as during the wave of pogroms that were connected with the First and Second Crusades, for instance, people who wished to escape the need for forced conversion or Kiddush ha-Shem (martyrdom) would “separate themselves” from their former lives, move out into the surrounding society of Christians and away from their previous family ties, social obligations and religious duties, and for a number of years or for the rest of their lives adapt a mode of living that was neither that of a Jew (insofar as they never rejoined the old or attached themselves to a new congregation or kehilla) or made a formal conversion to Christianity—or even pretended to be a born-Christian from some far away land.  Such persons went from place to place from moment to moment, as it were, without any specific and continuous identity; they would be what was needed at any point of crisis—when stopped by church or civil authorities and asked who they were, where they were from and what confession they belonged to—and say what seemed most expedient, safest and non-committal.  Nomads they were, in the sense of traveling peddlers, musicians, dancing masters, criminals, going about along the roads in amorphous and inconsistent groups.  In a sense to be  discussed later, these individuals were Jewish insofar as they found themselves always living apart, peculiar, sceptical and distrustful of whatever authorities they encountered yet trusting to a degree in the ultimate justice of the universe, and always questioning themselves and their place in the world.  They could not rid themselves of the inner baggage of their educations, formal and informal, based on Talmudic procedures of argumentation and probing given opinions.

These quasi- or indeterminate-Jews might, in a romantic way, occasionally attempt to fit in with one group or another, sometimes Christian, sometimes Jewish, sometimes like themselves without formal identity, for the sake of sociability, nostalgic return to childhood experiences, or curiosity about the nature of the “other” so long as no embarrassing questions were asked.  They were therefore more than outlaws with anti-social tendencies.  They only by circumstance might be considered mentally ill in respect to their inability to conform to the cultural and spiritual norms of the various peoples they passed through.  They were a very small—a tiny—number of modern individuals lost in a world that had as yet no categories into which to fit them—that is, people who did not define themselves by the group in which they were born or the place in which they chose to live.  Unlike many Christians who were eccentric, emotionally disturbed or cast-offs from their families and communities because of other peculiarities in their character, appearance or circumstances, these former Jews could not enter monasteries or convents; they would, if they found themselves in certain off situations, take on the enclosed religious life—or more often the archaic practice of the hermit, although that was rare (except in literature) from the late medieval period onwards—without any true calling.  Men and women from the surrounding culture would themselves sometimes take on the habit for sincere reasons of devotion and piety, but many were sent their by their families, escaped from abusive experiences, and sought the peace and quiet of a contemplative life for purely intellectual reasons, not necessarily out of an intense faith.  The commitment to a regular life of prayer, meditation and shared devotional labours would not conform to the alien needs of those wandering Jews who had detached themselves. 

In the first instance, those who accept baptism under duress or who endure the forced conversion without seeking the sanctification of the name or martyrdom are known as anusim, those who have been violated in the same sense as a raped woman.  In the second, the renegades or opportunist converts are treated as though they were dead and are now mere ghosts walking about the earth.  From the Christian perspective, the former Jew can be called a converso, a neophyte, or a New Christian, and yet there remains a lingering doubt about the sincerity of the conversion, hence the use of a term such as Nuevo Christiano even after many generations. 

For those New Christians who seek a kind of compromise position there is the possibility of living an outward life within the ritual boundaries and public expectations of the Catholic religion while inwardly—in the closed parameters of the domestic home and in the confines of individual mental solitude—remaining a Jew.  The term Marrano, with all its pejorative denotations (swine, child of a pig, harlot) and  connotations (filthy, untrustworthy, faithless), is used both by still practicing Jews against relatives and neighbours who have betrayed the Law of Moses and the bonds of the community, and by their new co-religionist in the Christian world to mark them as inassimilable, insincere and demonic agents of a hostile power.  However, the name Marrano can also slide into the domain of Crypto-Jews in which by varying degrees of strategy and species of cunning the conversos seek to subvert the categories marking the boundaries between Christian and Jew.   To be a Crypto-Jew or secret believer tests the limits of Jewish law, particularly when the single person or the small group becomes increasingly alienated from communal knowledge, education, customs and spiritual directions.  A series of inner compromises, substitutions and rationalizations creates a condition of ambiguity that can be as creative as it is deleterious and dangerous to those who inhabit this realm of unrecognized legal identity.  I have chosen to use the term Marrano to designate a form of unstable identity that is different from the category of Crypto-Jew, insofar as these Secret Jews believe themselves to be sincerely Jewish in all that truly matters—their faith, their spirituality, and their ethical beliefs—with their behaviour, appearance, and public professions as Christians modified by subtle, cunning and coded innuendo and manipulations.  For the Crypto-Jew the dangers of being found out by some slip of the tongue or laxness in action or of being denounced by close family, friends, neighbours or rivals in the outer community constitute a dimension of their existence that constantly proves their adherence to the ancient Jewish faith.

The Marrano, as individual or as small group, remains ambiguous, unsure of who or what his or her true identity is, sometimes shifting from external allegiance to the Church to the Synagogue and back again, within one lifetime or within the living memory of the family generations.  While this also creates the thrill of living on the margins, playing teasing games with various ecclesiastical, civil and national institutions, the ambiguity itself can become a primary component of the way the single person, family or small group defines and evaluates itself.  This ambiguity will eventually become a hallmark of modernity in European civilizations but for many hundreds of years has no legal or credible dimension with which the persons involved can be satisfied. 

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A series of amusing anecdotes from the Brooklyn (New York) Jewish milieu in which I grew up more than seventy years ago may bring into focus the existential reality of these dangers and ambiguities faced by the Marrano.  I start with a story about a conversion undertaken for business reasons.  In this narrative, a certain Jake Ginzberg, a tailor by profession, seeks to enhance his position in English society near the end of the nineteenth century, and thus decides to become an Episcopalian.  He duly begins to attend Church every Sunday and to stop attending synagogue on Saturdays.  After several months of taking instruction from the local priest, he is welcomed into the church and is properly baptized.  His wife and children observe all this with some scepticism, but out of respect for the father of the family, they make no objections.  Then the Sunday following his becoming a member of the Christian persuasion, his wife notices that it is nearly nine-thirty in the morning and Jake has not yet woken up.  “Jake,” she says, shaking her husband, “get up.  Have you forgotten what day it is?  You have to get dressed or you will be late for church.”  Jake opens his eyes, looks at the clock, then hits his hand against his forehead, “Oy, a goyisha kupf!”

 The point of this old joke, if we can be so uncouth as to unpack the problem in explicit terms, is that Jake cannot get away from his own instinctive Jewish habits of mind, although at the same time when his wife points out to him that he is ruining his chances of being accepted into the Christian community he has made the effort to join through his formal conversion, he now objectifies his new identity and blames his forgetfulness on the reputed stupidity of gentiles.  He has thus been transformed and not been transformed.  He is estranged from the very persona he has wished to take on as his own.  There is never a question, of course, about readjusting his beliefs or attitudes towards the spiritual and the religious.  Whatever he may have studied and professed in order to achieve the conversion appears as superficial at best and meaningless at worst.  In a sense, his wife, who has not been a party to this experiment in identity change, is more aware of the need for Jake to adopt new modes of behaviour than he himself.

In another Jewish anecdote, this one set somewhere in old Ukraine, there is imagined to be an aged Jewish father, Mendel Faigenbaum who, feeling himself reaching the end of his days, calls his three sons together to his bedside and announces that he plans to convert, and asks the sons to bring the local Orthodox priest as soon as possible.  Though grumbling and reluctant to go the three Faigenbaum boys do as they were bidden and bring Father Dimitri to the house.  The sons look puzzled and demoralized.  Mendel sends them out of the room, and explains to the young priest what is wanted.  The cleric is delighted to think of baptizing a Jew, so immediately goes out to bring the appropriate materials to carry out the ritual.  He asks no questions and gives no instructions: the prize is too valuable to risk being lost.  The next morning Father Dimitri returns, along with a young boy carrying censor and a small satchel with crucifix, a few consecrated wafers. and a vial holy water.  The three sons stand alone in the next room waiting for the ceremony to be completed.  They hint to one another that their father must be crazy, but not one of them has the courage to stand up against the old man’s wishes.  Half an hour later, the priest departs with a huge smile on his face, brushes past the boys, and returns to his church.  The sons enter the father’s bedroom.  “My sons,” Mendel whispers, his whole appearance looking more pale and weak than ever, “I will be departing this world very shortly. Before I go, it is better I explain to you why I have taken this extraordinary step of becoming a Christian.”  Each son starts to object, each bites his lips, each remains silent.  “Do not worry,” the father says.  “I have not lost my mind.  Mishuggah I am not.  I am going to pass away very soon, if not today, then tomorrow or maybe the next day, God willing.”  The tears come to the eyes of the three sons.  They almost stammer out their complaints.  “Shaa, shaa,” Mendel says.  “Look, it’s a hard world, nebech, and haven’t we Jews suffered enough for such a long time?  Now when I die, so what?  Better one of them than one of us.”

The whimsical turn here can be seen in the playing off of the sons’ concerns that their father has gone mad through his conversion and the sudden reversal of expectations wherein the old man plays an ambiguous trick on the gentile society he has pretended to enter at the crisis point of his death.  At such an extreme moment of spiritual decision-making, when a person is supposed to slough aside all concerns for the here and now and turn his or her attention to ultimate things, the disposition of the soul and the eternal placement of consciousness, Mendel Faigenbaum seems to place his attention on a final insult to the religion that has insulted him and his people throughout his own life and through all of European history.  In a bizarre manipulation of words and concepts, he presents his action as rescuing his own Jewish soul from death and instead adding to the list of dead among his enemies. 

A perverse variation can be seen in the character of Dr. Heinrich Bodenheimer in Sholem Asch’s Yiddish novel of the 1930s The War Goes On.  Bodenheimer is a Jewish intellectual who takes delight in writing essays and pamphlets on the virtues of Christianity as the means for universal peace, Judaism having become, since the Fall of the Temple, a useless nuisance in the world:

And yet Dr, Bodenheimer refused to let himself be baptized!  Certainly this was partly out of respect for the family tradition and out of fear of his dead father and willingness to hurt the feelings of his mother.  But there were other grounds also for his fidelity to the faith of his forefathers.  People must not be able to to say that a Dr. Bodenheimer had required baptism to aid him in making a career!  In spite of his great learning he had not been offered a chair at any university, though certain Christian circles in which his writings were highly regarded had hinted delicately that he could easily get a chair if he would only be baptized.[1]  

His reluctance to convert to Christianity to honour his dead father’s memory and his living mother’s feelings are common motifs even today, while the wish to maintain faith with his ancestors has taken on a stronger intensity for those who were born on the other side of the Holocaust.  But there is also personal pride involved, beginning with Bodenheimer’s refusal to be seen as someone dictated by the expediency of professional ambitions.  The reasoning that follows takes his position into the perversity of a self-hating Jew, albeit the narrator claims the motive is unconscious.

Still another consideration moved him, though he was unaware of it: what would Professor Bodenheimer become if he consented to be baptized?  Merely another converted Jew!  One among multitude, a drop in the ocean.  Himself an unbaptized, Dr. Bodenheimer held up Christianity as the only refuge for a doomed civilization; himself an unbaptized Jew, he proclaimed Christianity as the highest moral power in the world, and asserted that whoever remained outside its fold remained outside human society.

This paragraph, punctuated with repetitions of the word baptism instead of any synonym and with many exclamation points, exposes the irony of the self-justifying, self-congratulatory heretic, and reveals that the narrator here is paraphrasing Bodenheimer’s own voice, as well as making explicit what he keeps hidden from himself.  This is made more emphatic in the italicized word that follows:

Thus spoke an unbaptized Jew!  There was something original and unprecedented for you; not everybody had the courage to do that!

Though he is addressing himself in his own inner-speech, the you mentioned here is the whole world, including Christians he wishes to impress and Jews he knows he will cause to blush by his vaunting, and the primary Jew he is addressing here is himself.

 Those who Separate Themselves

The Crypto-Jews and Marranos should also be distinguished from those Jews who assimilate so far as to lose touch with what any rabbinical community would recognize as specifically Jewish.  The ambiguities can be seen to pitch in with those men and women who, though their parents had them baptized without always sharing in the ceremony or they converted themselves for a variety of reasons—cultural and social ambition, to be sure, but also a strong desire to “fit in” to the intellectual and milieu to which they feel drawn by temperament and spirit—remain identified as Jews by those around them, both friendly and hostile, and thus feel the sting of exclusion more or less throughout their lives.  While they remain apart from their ancestral communities and seem to take no interest in its history or beliefs, whenever the voices and violence of anti-Semitism raise themselves, these people feel compelled to come to the defence of their ancestors and contemporaries.  Once we move beyond the concept of the Marrano as a specific geographical and historical person in crisis—the Sephardim who were forced to convert by the Inquisition—we can think of marranism as a kind of Jewishness in itself, not always as ambiguous to the Marrano him or herself as to the outsider whether a practicing halachic Jew or a member of the dominant non-Jewish society. In other words, ambiguity in itself may be a desirable factor, even when it is painful to experience, because it creates a series of situations in the individual’s life, that of the family to which he or she belongs, and the community that basically thinks in terms of either/or choices—a series of situations that are creative insofar as they cause reflection on who one is, what one is supposed to be and do in the world and how one finds meaning in this tension-filled condition; reconsideration of the formal categories as valuable determinants of individual, communal and national identity; and reassessment of decisions already taken by one’s ancestors and oneself in regard to spiritual, customary and psychological relationship to what—if anything—lies beyond the material self. 

This kind of marranism or ambiguity is seen in a classical sense in Marcel Proust’s character Charles Swann.  After a lifetime of ingratiating himself with the elites who meet regularly in various Parisian salons through his manners and conversation and gaining a reputation as a connoisseur of art, ignoring the whispers of the anti-Semites that encroach on his supposedly safe assimilation, when the Dreyfus Affair begins, Swann realizes he is a Jew and withdraws from the places where ridicule and hostility become explicit.  It is, however, too late for him to rejoin the Jewish community, even if he so wished, and thus he finds himself very much left out in the cold, neither comfortable in his old haunts nor able to commit himself to the social world he long since departed from.  The narrator Marcel in A la recherche de temps perdu feels great sympathy for his older friend and mentor, Swann, he observes the changes in the man and in the society around him from a significant distance and watches the passions roused by the controversy gradually recede as the years pass.  Though Marcel Proust, the author and historical person, a Jew through his mother’s family, also felt roused enough by the Affair to pay close attention to its development and to become active in collecting signatures of intellectuals for the petitions that were circulated after Zola’s challenging J’accuse…, he did not take the opportunity to do more than note the rising tide of anti-Semitism and to read books on Jewish history and culture that could provide a degree of depth to his long novel.  Through his father’s heritage, Proust was brought up as a Catholic, at least nominally. His father, though a scientist and civil administrator, did not stress religion at home, and left his son two sons’ education to the mother. She never converted herself and with her mother continued to live a quietly Jewish life; yet she ensured that young Marcel received a formal Catholic education and went to first communion.  By halachic law, Proust was therefore Jewish, but in practice he was not brought up to be a Jew.  As a writer, Marcel Proust does not let religion intrude into his work nor into his public life. 

In his one great achievement as an author, his major themes concern his own identity problems as a homosexual and as an outsider to the social sphere to which he aspires.  However much one may consider the Dreyfus Affair to be one of the driving forces in the development in the career of the central characters and the allusions to biblical themes and images as part of the novel’s essential textuality, Jewishness remains at best a subsidiary consideration, and it would be a distortion to think of either the novel or its author as Jewish.  Had he lived another ten years at least, Proust may have found that being a Jew was not something he could put aside casually.

Though a professed Jewish writer like the Swiss-French Albert Cohen makes no attempt to hide his Jewish identity, and in both his novels and essays weaves in comic characters, situations, and themes, again we cannot call his work more than marginally part of the modern Jewish canon. Nevertheless, for all the success of his books at the time of their writing, what reputation he has in Europe has faded, and the memory of his Jewishness lies dormant. It may well be that his Jewish identity has ensured that an award-winning novel such as Belle de Seigneur does not resonate with subsequent audiences because of its minor Jewish characteristics. Similarly, Novel Prize winner Elias Canetti does not disguise his Jewishness; nor does he parade it as central to his own personality or his books, even his autobiography.  It is there and yet not there.  For instance, once he recalls in his personal narrative that he grew up in Rostok, Bulgaria among Sephardi Jews, he virtually never mentions his religious or historical identity again, not even when he is forced to take flight from Germany to England because of the Nazi persecutions.  Even Franz Kafka, for all his interest in Yiddish theatre in Prague, his dabbling in kabbalistic lore, and his interest in Zionism, does not speak of his Jewishness in his fiction and in  most of his other writings, and most commentators and critics treat his Judaism as vague background and something he moved away from during his relatively short life. 

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[1] Sholem Asch (Szalom Asz, שלום אַש), The War Goes On, trans, Willa and Edwin Muir (New York, NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1936); the novel is entitled The Calf of Paper in its UK edition.  It was first published in Yiddish as Der Krieg geht weiter.