On Being a Jew in a Non-Jewish World, Part 2

Conversos, New Christians, Crypto-Jews and Marranos yet Again

In a kind of autobiographical novel, Sarah Bernhardt’s fictional father is the author of  a book called Philosophy is not Indifference.  Because so many people still think of philosophy as a purely abstract, unworldly and irrelevant study of pointless ideas or (what amounts to the same thing) Big Ideas conducted by rather naïve and befuddled intellectuals, the book by Prof. Darbois in La petite idole (transaletd as The Idol of Paris,1920) has at least this continuing significance: to be indifferent and to be philosophical are not the same thing.  More than that, just as there are many readers who confuse disinterested and uninterested—as though to have no interest in something in the sense of no involvement in the running of an enterprise or investment of funds in the business or some other vital concern that prevents objectivity and fairness (thus we speak of conflict of interests when a politician votes for a law that gives special advantage to an industry that he is heavily involved with or a judge asked to hear the case of a person she has known as a friend for many years or had a love affair with)—there are those who mistake indifference for objectivity and disinterestedness: whereas to be indifferent is not to care at all about something, its origins, outcomes or effects.  

The kind of Jew who is indifferent about his or her own status as a Jew or the obligations under the Law of Moses or the safety, security and welfare of other Jews, and these days that means more than one’s own immediate family but all of Israel, Land and People, has to be seen as different than someone who worries over choices, actions and feelings all the time.  Historically speaking about the specific terms conversos, New Christians, Crypto-Jews, and Marranos, the circumstances of each may overlap, but the conditions of their relationship to themselves, their original backgrounds, their legal and social status in the world, and even their obligations under the Law are different.  

The conversos or converted Christians in Iberia and its various overseas colonies and European territories could cover both those who accepted baptism under extreme duress and those who went to the font voluntarily; they were Roman Catholics.  But given the paranoia in Spain and Portugal over the sincerity of such conversions and the fear of a large proportion of racially and spiritually different nominal Christians undermining the integrity of the Church and the State, the next generation and the next and the next down through the centuries were still known as New Christians—and as such were always held under suspicion, considered to have impure blood, and therefore restricted in terms of marriage, civil and military service and place of residence.  For this reason, whether the original conversions were carried out for honest intentions of spiritual change or undertaken strategically to save one’s life, fortunes or  social status, the next generations—individuals, families, and sometimes whole communes—had to confront the question of who and what they were, what they believed and how they behaved in public and private.  

Whether they wished to be or not, each new generation of the New Christians had to consider their personal relationship with their Jewish ancestry.  They could attempt to put it out of sight and mind through petitions for certificates of purity of blood and then hope that no relative, neighbour or business rival would denounce them to the Inquisition.  They could attempt to live a double or more complex life as a Crypto-Jew, performing in public all the duties of good Catholics and subjects of their gracious Catholic Majesties, while maintaining in private amongst close and trusted family members an attenuated Jewishness of furtive and symbolic fulfilment of the mitzvoth, so far as they could be remembered and understood with no rabbinical or social institutions to teach, support and provide mutual support.  As this was often a very individual choice, the circle of family members or friends who could be trusted would be extremely reduced, sometimes down to just oneself—and then not always, as a Crypto-Jew might find him or herself unable to bear the tensions and anxieties and turn oneself in to the Holy Office out of a sense of Christian piety or the need to find some relief in the punishments meted out in the dungeons of the Inquisition or on the open plaza of an auto-da-fé.  

When single persons, close-knit families or more extended Jews found themselves in a condition when they could not decide which they wanted to be or felt most comfortable in calling themselves—either their legally professed Catholicism or their internally believed Jewishness—they might consequently choose one or the other at different points in their lives, move back and forth across the borders between the Lands of Persecution and the Lands of Toleration, thus living as one thing here and another there.  Or the family might divide, with some members sent overseas to marry into practicing Jewish families and most remaining behind to look after the business, the lands and the other interests of the group in the more or less nominal role of Christians.  Marranos were those who were either confused, constantly worried about, or enjoyed the tensions, dangers and spiritual excitement of the liminal status.  

Confusion does not mean indifference to the choices to be made, and it usually came about historically because in law—in the various Catholic, Protestant and few almost secular states of the pre-modern period—there was no way for a person to be not a Catholic, Protestant or Jew.  You had to be one or the other, often with very different rights and privileges, taxes and conditions of residency.  Only in our own western world and only for a relatively brief period is it possible to be indifferent, to be neither a Christian or a Jew, neither a Catholic or a Protestant; that is, to claim no confessional identity at all or to make one up out of the air, as it were.  Confusion existed in the mind and the heart, and it usually had to be masked, just as any other choice of religion than that allowed or privileged by the national and local authorities had to be hidden under some form of disguise—or asserted with a great deal of social, legal and physical consequences.

When that confusion bubbled around in the hearts and minds of individuals and those near to him or her who realized what was happening, it created constant states of anxiety or panic.  It was not something one wished to sustain any longer than was possible or practical, and so often led to escape from the points of geography or chronology in one’s life cycle when it was possible to run away or accept the direst of consequences by “outing oneself.” 

Yet there were some Marranos, as individuals and small groups, who found the confusion meaningful in a positive sense.  They could see the anxiety and danger as proof of their individuality, independence, and spiritual worth.  The greater the tensions and the riskier the game, the more they believed they were being purified, rising above the Christian society which persecuted their ancestors and themselves, and above the Jewish communities that nagged them to escape and return to the rabbinical disciplines they no longer believed in or trusted—could not trust because, if the Church had shown itself persecutory and hypocritical by not believing in its own dogma of cleansing baptism and forgiveness of sinners, but rather claiming that Jewish blood was a racial taint ineradicable and perpetually polluting and thus beyond mercy and absolution, then the Synagogue had shown itself weak in protecting its children, muddled in its response to those who had been forced to grow up as Catholics and cut off from Jewish instruction.  Moreover, if the Catholic theologians had nothing but hatred to preach and endless enmity to the very race that had given birth to its Lord and Savior, the Jewish rabbis and teachers seemed to have locked themselves into the darkness of pilpul and irrational or hysterical rituals.  The Marranos, tested by hostile authorities and testing themselves every day in their self-questioning and their refusal to accept easy answers, came to see themselves as purified of hidebound dogmas and superstitions on all other sides.  

However, were these people—Spinoza, Montaigne, Cervantes, for instance, to choose early cases—really Jews, practicing Jews?  This is the same question the bookshop owner asked about Alfred Dreyfus and my old academic friend about Sarah Bernhardt.  At least we can say they were not indifferent about it.