REFUGEES OF THE IBERIAN INQUISITIONS
The network of Jewish communities that would become the Sephardi diaspora of the Early Modern Period was formed by successive migration movements. A se-ries of expulsions at the end of the fifteenth century projected Jews from Spain, Portugal, Navarra, Provence, and Southern Italy into exile, mainly towards North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. The expulsion from Portugal, decreed in 1496, had been transformed by King Manuel in the following year into a forced mass conversion to Christianity; and the threat against the large number of recent Judeo-converts that were trapped in the Atlantic kingdom materialized in the Lisbon massacre of 1506 and the first Inquisitorial persecutions in 1536. Nominally Catholic individuals, families, and small groups left Portugal in a steady trickle during the sixteenth through the eighteenth century and sought refuge in destina-tions all around the globe. The second and subsequent generadestina-tions of these ‘New Christians’ had been almost entirely deprived of Jewish education and socializa-tion. They were integrated by force into gentile society, a phenomenon which hardly any Jewish group in premodern history had hitherto experienced.1 Still several thousands, if not tens of thousands, among the New Christian emigrants were successfully reintegrated into the Jewish collectivity following the loss of their homeland, often forming their own synagogues. In the Ottoman Empire and in Italy, the ‘Portuguese’ lived alongside Jews of other origins, distinguished by their Westernized culture. Along the Atlantic coastline, they tended to settle in places where the presence of Jews had been interrupted since the Middle Ages and where, viewed from the angle of modern Jewish history, they would make a pioneering impact.2
The New Christians’ experience of exile, the literary construction of which comprises the subject of the present study, was different from that of other confes-sional minorities of the Early Modern Period insofar as the suspicion they aroused at home, as well as the acceptance they found among Jews abroad, had a primarily
1 Todd M. Endelman, ‘Jewish Self-Identification and West European Categories of Belonging from the Enlightenment to World War II’, in Religion or Ethnicity? Jewish Identities in Evolution, ed. by Zvi Gitelman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), pp. 104–130 (p. 105).
2 Carsten L. Wilke, Histoire des juifs portugais (Paris: Chandeigne, 2007), pp. 119–120, 139–142.
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ethnic motivation and could at times be at odds with their individual religious persuasions. In this respect, the case of the early-modern New Christians fleeing from persecution and discrimination differed profoundly from that of the Jews expelled in 1492. If for the latter, religious difference had been the reason for their expulsion, the former, inversely, only became Jews after having been expelled.
In their migrations, New Christians also moved between religious and cultural identities. For those who, educated as Christians, now found themselves in exile among Jews, community distinctions became ambivalent and porous; and though a change of religion often restored the Jewish-Christian dichotomy, emigrants tended to imagine and elaborate their new Jewish identity according to the pat-terns of group identification inherited from their Christian past. These different translations of the exilic condition into a pattern of identity accounted for some of the important contrasts between the Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire and those of the Atlantic world.
It may seem that the most unproblematic facet of the identity change brought about by persecution and emigration was a switch in political loyalties.
Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, one of the best known Jewish spokespersons in the Early Modern Period, received the Prince of Orange in 1642 in the synagogue of Amsterdam with a clear-cut declaration of allegiance: ‘Our fatherland is no more Spain or Portugal, and as our lords, we no more recognize the Castilian or Lusitanian kings, but those kings of the martyrs’ blood, who defend the re-ligion of their ancestors’.3 One year earlier, speaking again to a Dutch Christian audience, Menasseh ben Israel had defined his national identity in a more com-plex way, calling himself ‘a Portuguese with a Batavian soul’ (Lusitano con ánimo batavo),4 which depicts a split of loyalties almost on an anthropological level: the body is still Portuguese, but the spirit is already Dutch.
While Rabbi Menasseh’s opportunistic change of sides scandalized one Spanish historian, who sarcastically commented that with such flagrant cases of Jewish betrayal there was no more need for antisemitic slander, a less impassioned perspective5 would rather find Menasseh’s declaration to be inevitable among a persecuted group that still had to struggle for acceptance in its new environment,
3 Henry Méchoulan, ‘À propos de la visite de Frédéric-Henri, prince d’Orange, à la synagogue d’Amsterdam: une lettre inédite de Menasseh ben Israel (1604–1657) à David de Wilhelm, suivie de la traduction francaise du discours de bienvenue’, Lias, 5 (1978), 81–86.
4 Herman P. Salomon, ‘A oração para a autoridade na esnoga de Amesterdão como factor de conservação da identidade portuguesa’, Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas, 7 (2007), 255–272 (pp. 260–261).
5 See, for instance, Henry Méchoulan, ‘Menasseh and the World of the Non-Jew,’ in: Yosef Kaplan et al., eds, Menasseh ben Israel and his World (Leiden: Brill, 1989), pp. 83–97 (p. 86); Harm den Boer, ‘Exile in Sephardic Literature of Amsterdam,’ Studia Rosenthaliana 35.2 (2001), 187–199 (p. 195); Miriam Bodian,
‘The Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam and the Status of Christians,’ in: Elisheva Carlebach et al. (eds), New Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Relations. In Honor of David Berger (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 329–357 (p. 338).
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one that only had a qualified form of tolerance to offer. Italy accepted Jews, but persecuted apostates of Christianity. France accepted only the latter, as long as they did not publicly announce their new religion, and the Netherlands accepted them only on the condition that they maintained a normative set of Jewish re-ligious ideas.
In some of these countries, anti-Iberian feelings were stronger than those against Jews. What would be called the ‘Black Legend’ was formed in the second half of the sixteenth century as a reaction to Spain’s European and colonial expan-sionism in the service of counter-reformation. Iberian emigrants had to confirm and interiorize these hostile stereotypes against their very countries of origin, which they could encounter in England, France, Italy, and in the Protestant coun-tries as the ‘price of Spanish hegemony’. García Cárcel, a historian of the Black Legend, insists upon ‘the significant influence that Jews expelled from Spain had in the formation of the negative image of Spain’.6 In other words, a certain degree of self-hatred was expected and duly received from them by their new protectors.
However, the political discourse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was fundamentally inconsequential in its national and political ideologies. Social ostracism against Judeo-converts in Iberian societies could go hand in hand with a violent pressure on their integration. Abroad, hostility against Spanish religious politics could coexist with admiration for Spanish literature and fashion, and attentiveness for the drugs and innovations that came from Iberia and its colo-nies. Among the Jews, enduring family and business relations with the Iberian countries of origin and the proud ostentation of a hispanophone culture in exile were not at all in contradiction with the ideological demonization of Spain as an apocalyptic Fourth Kingdom. Historians of Judaism found it amazing that Sephardim felt less enmity towards the Iberian kingdoms and their cultures than an observer accustomed to modern nationalisms and counter-nationalisms might feel obliged to expect.7 Jewish refugees, even rabbis, expressed themselves with pride in the Iberian languages, and adhered to customs and tastes imported from the Iberian Peninsula.
In an often quoted extreme case discovered by Jonas Andries van Praag, the entrepreneur and religious author Abraham Pereyra plagiarized in his Jewish treatises of 1666 and 1671 entire pages from pious Spanish authors represent-ing the militant Catholicism that had exiled him. This ambivalence between
6 Ricardo García Cárcel, La leyenda negra: historia y opinión (Madrid: Alianza, 1992), pp. 81–91, quotes from pp. 29, 82.
7 Henry Méchoulan, ‘Présence de l’Espagne dans la pensée juive à Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza’, Les Nouveaux Cahiers, 62 (1980), 26–31; Yosef Kaplan, ‘Una diáspora en exilio: actitudes hacia España entre los Sefardíes de la Edad Moderna’, in Marginados y minorías sociales en la España moderna y otros estudios sobre Extremadura, ed. by Felipe Lorenzana de la Puente and Francisco J. Mateos Ascacíbar (Llerena:
Sociedad Extremeña de Historia, 2005), pp. 9–25.
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hostility to Christian Iberia and embeddedness in its culture has been given by Van Praag the diagnosis of an almost pathological ‘split consciousness’.8 Daniel Swetschinski fustigated the Iberian cultural borrowings of the Amsterdam Jews as an expression of their blindness, laxity, and laziness in matters of Jewish identity,9 Miriam Bodian linked the same atavic attachment to a positive fascination with
‘Iberian aristocratic social values’ expressed in the discourses of racial and doc-trinal purity.10 Henry Méchoulan interpreted the refugees’ enduring hispanity as a culturally creative search for common roots behind apparently hostile cultural positions, as Christian and Judaic theology have common scriptural sources and shared concerns, such as atonement and salvation.11 Many of these Iberian refer-ences are indeed, Harm den Boer noted, ‘of a surprisingly plain and unworried type’.12 Yosef Kaplan suggested that the cultural mixing can also translate as an exceptional openness of mind;13 and Yirmiyahu Yovel even found among Judeo-Portuguese emigrants a blueprint of the modern subject with its multiple coexist-ing identities.14
Alhough the ‘bricolage’ between the old and the new culture should not be pathologized, it should not be banalized either. For these Iberian emigrants, the sixteenth-century invention of national mythologies forestalled any easy distinc-tion between political partisanship and cultural identity during the migradistinc-tion between countries at war with each other. Long before the rise of modern na-tionalist ideologies, Renaissance humanism had made political loyalty to signify
8 Jonas Andries van Praag, ‘Almas en litigio’, Clavileño, 1 (janvier-février 1950), 14–26. One of Pereyra’s treatises was edited with source references by Henry Méchoulan, Hispanidad y judaísmo en tiempos de Espinoza. Edición de ‘La Certeza del Camino’ de Abraham Pereyra (Amsterdam, 1666) (Salamanca:
Universidad, 1987).
9 Daniel Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth Century Amsterdam, (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), p. 311.
10 Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 85, 92–95. Parallel notions of ethnic purity are also observed by Yosef Kaplan, though his conclusions are different; see his Les Nouveaux-Juifs d’Amsterdams: Essais sur l’histoire sociale et intellectuelle du judaïsme séfarade au xviie siècle (Paris:
Chandeigne, 1999), pp. 72–81; and the interpretation of these parallels by Natalia Muchnik, De paroles et de gestes: constructions marranes en terre d’Inquisition (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2014), pp. 36–45.
11 Méchoulan, Hispanidad y judaísmo, p. 62.
12 Harm den Boer, La literatura sefardí de Amsterdam, Alcalá: Universidad, 1995, p. 25. See also Harm den Boer, ‘Más allá de hispanidad y judaísmo: Hacia una caracterización de la literatura hispano-portu-guesa de los sefardíes de Amsterdam’, en Los judaizantes en Europa y la literatura castellana del Siglo de Oro, ed. by Fernando Díaz Esteban (Madrid: Letrúmero, 1994), pp. 65–75.
13 Yosef Kaplan, ‘El perfil cultural de tres rabinos sefardíes a través del análisis de sus bibliotecas’, in Familia, Religión y Negocio. El sefardismo en las relaciones entre el mundo ibérico y los Países Bajos en la Edad Moderna, ed. by Jaime Contreras et al. (Madrid: Fundación Carlos de Amberes, 2003), pp. 269–
286 (p. 284).
14 Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos. Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 344–347.
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more than just a fidelity to the ruling dynasty.15 A symbolic feeling of belonging was attached to one’s country’s empiric features such as climate, landscape, lan-guage, food, clothing, entertainment, and literary practices. The canonization of national poets and of the ancient founding myths sung by them added to this new symbolism. During the same time period, thus, as Western Europeans de-veloped a new emotional attachment to their national myths and sanctuaries, the Jewish minorities expelled from these real-and-imagined spaces produced similar, although transnational patterns of belonging through the mixing of emigrant groups inside the new Ashkenazi and Sephardi macrocommunities of Eastern and South Eastern Europe. The sixteenth-century Portuguese emigrant lived at the fault line between the West European and the Jewish forms of early-modern collective integration. The Lisbon praised by Camões confronted the Zion vener-ated in the Bible.16
In sum, the prevailing regime of cujus regio, ejus religio did not allow the question of belonging to be settled by means of peaceful cultural hybridity, and certainly not by any exclusive identification. Poetic invention, at this moment, became an outlet for exilic feelings, not only because the Renaissance taste of melancholy invited tears to flow freely, but also because literary imagery often allowed the contradictory emotional values of home and exile to be represented side by side. An allegorical road map for realignment with Judaism could thus be drawn. In their figurative expressions, Jewish authors searched the harmonization of two opposing literary conventions: the biblical topos of galut, which theologi-cally implies a divine punishment of a solidary community, was expressed in the terms of the classical exile’s dirge stemming from Ovid, which emphasized indi-vidual uprootedness and isolation. While in the Bible, the deported community suffers from a foreign invader such as Babylon, inversely the Greek or Roman exile stands as an ostracized individual in conflict with his own community. Both lit-erary traditions penetrated Iberian literatures in a Christianized form, mediated by the medieval ascetic topos of the pilgrimage of life through a hostile world in pursuit of salvation.
These biblical, classical, and ascetic strands were knitted together by a Portuguese Jewish Latinist of the second half of the mid-sixteenth century, who became one of the most distinguished Renaissance poets of exile. Diogo Pires (1517–1599) was born in Evora in Southern Portugal only twenty years after the forced conversion of his father, who fled the country with him in 1535 for
15 While Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson insisted upon the modern roots of nationalism, this view has been challenged by Anthony D. Smith in Nationalism and Modernism (1998) and The Antiquity of Nations (2004), where premodern ethnosymbolic discourse is shown to anticipate nationalistic positions.
16 Wilke, Histoire des juifs portugais, p. 131.
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fear of the newly-established Inquisition. As a neo-Latin humanist, trained in Salamanca, Paris, and Louvain, he called himself Didacus Pyrrhus Lusitanus; and as a Jew, which he became in Ragusa (now Dubrovnik), he took the name Isaiah Cohen. Pires, who fought in the fleet of Andrea Doria against the Barbarossa brothers, reacted intensely to contemporary political and military events.17
A Jew among Catholics, Pires recruits classical legacy as the means of creating a cultural common ground. He invokes pagan gods and nymphs in every possible context, even when he expresses his Jewish piety; in particular, he compares his destiny to that of Ulysses, a wanderer without a direction home, terrorized by the prospect of having to be buried in foreign soil, and persecuted by the blind and tyrannical goddess Fortune.18 To Dinko Zlatarić, the Croatian-born rector of the University of Padua from 1579, Pires dedicated his late elegy De exsilio suo, which is transmitted in a manuscript of the Historical Institute of Dubrovnik.19 Writing in a small fortress on the shores of Montenegro, the poet contrasts the gloomy sight of the ‘icy’ Dalmatian coast (in gelidae rupibus Illyriae), devastated from the recent Ottoman victories, with Evora, the mythic city of his childhood, for which he longs all the more as he knows he will never see it again. In a perfect balance between Ovidian loneliness and Jewish solidarity, the exile imagines him-self persecuted individually, but for a faith shared with his community: An quia solemnes ritus, et auita meorum / Sacra colo, patriis finibus exul agor? (Is it because I celebrate the solemn rituals and sacred ceremonies of my ancestors that I have to wander about as an exile far from the fatherland?).
Trying to name and blame the origin of his troubles, Pires depicts a reincarna-tion of the infamous allegorical queen of Babel that is responsible for Israel’s exile in the Bible.20 He pours out his wrath against the two treacherous female powers responsible for his banishment, namely the goddess Fortuna and Queen Isabella of Castile: ‘may her vile shadow dwell in the infernal swamps,’ who had expelled the Jews of Castile in spite of her oath to protect them. In his vengeance-laced fantasies, Pires conjures up the Moorish armies to take Granada again, to break into the perjurous queen’s tomb, and to strew her remains in the ocean.21 It is remarkable that he follows the genealogy of his suffering beyond the Portuguese
17 Carlos Ascenso André, Um judeu no desterro: Diogo Pires e a memória de Portugal (Lisbon: Inst. Nac.
de Inv. Científica, 1992), see pp. 13–17 on his youth and emigration; George Hugo Tucker, Homo Viator:
Itineraries of Exile, Displacement and Writing in Renaissance Europe (Geneva: Droz, 2003), pp. 195–238.
18 André, Um judeu no desterro, p. 105.
19 First published by Urbani Appendini Carmina, accedunt selecta illustrium Ragusinorum poemata (Ragusa: Typis Martecchinianis, 1811), pp. 236–242; more recently in Diogo Pires, Antologia poética, ed. and trl. Carlos Ascenso André (Coimbra: Centro de estudos classicos e humanisticos da Univ. de Coimbra, 1983), pp. 84–89, and André, Um poeta no desterro, pp. 50–57.
20 Isaiah 47; Jeremiah 50; Psalm 137:8.
21 André, Um judeu no desterro, p. 51: ‘Nec melior sors sit periurae coniugis, opto. / Degener infernos incolat umbra lacus. / At male compositos cineres, atque ossa reuulsa / Victor in Oceani deleat Afer aqua.’
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Inquisition back to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, as if his hatred for Isabella allowed him to join in communion with of all his Sephardi coreligionists of the Mediterranean diaspora.
The paradox of exilic isolation and reincorporation into a diaspora group is most outspoken when Pires imagines his physical death, daring a close-up on the quintessential horror of a burial in foreign earth. When imagining the scene in detail, he is consoled by the idea that he will have saved his body from the rage of the inquisitors and will surrender it undesecrated to the soil of the little Jewish cemetery on the Dalmatian coast where fellow Jews will pay their last respect to him. Hic mea nec ferro, nigra neque tacta fauilla | Ossa uelim placide condat amica manus (Here, untouched by the iron blade and by the black ashes, | my bones will be peacefully put to rest by a friendly hand). Defended by Jewish burial customs, the Portuguese exile’s tomb will become part of the Mediterranean ritual land-scape: At tu, siue legis portum seu litore funem | diripis, aeternum, nauta, praecare uale (And when you sail into the port or light fire on the beach | give him, o boatsman, an eternal farewell).
Pires mythologizes and feminizes persecution, as he represents it by the evil personalities of Fortune and Queen Isabella, calling the latter an Erinye and a Megaera, but he does not eroticize them. In contrast, he compares the lost home to a beloved, inaccessible mistress,22 to whom he aspires with passionate love.
His Horatian-style epistle that he addressed in 1567 to the Croatian philosopher
His Horatian-style epistle that he addressed in 1567 to the Croatian philosopher