Souls in Dispute. David L. Graizbord
like the divergent solutions these historians posited, may strike us as a somewhat romantic and heavy-handedly nationalist approach to history, an approach similar to that espoused by patriotic historians elsewhere in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. The debt of Sánchez and Castro to the German Idealist tradition of Herder (and others) is especially apparent in the two Hispanists’ immanentist conception of “the Spanish nation” as an almost primordial, historically continuous entity with a unique character and destiny. For them, what was basic to Spanishness—the volksgeist of Spaniards, as it were—gave structure to Spanish history, just as history expressed what was fundamental about the Spaniard.20
Similar premises are evident in the work of Jewish scholars—including historians of the “Jerusalem School,” such as Baer—whose different perspectives on the “true” character of fifteenth-century conversos may well speak of modern nationalist preoccupations as much as these perspectives shed light on Ibero-Jewish history. According to Baer, most ordinary conversos (as distinct from the traitorous converso elite) were in actuality Jews who were consciously connected to the main body of the Jewish nation.21 For Benzion Netanyahu, in contrast, almost all conversos became fully absorbed into Christianity during the 1400s, so much so that Judaizing was a negligible occurrence among them. For the first historian, then, conversos served to prove Jewish resiliency in the face of gentile oppression.22 For the second, they demonstrated the tragedy of national dissolution in exile. As Yirmiyahu Yovel opines, “Both scholars … had a tacit ideological (indeed Zionist) agenda, Baer providing the modern national Jewish consciousness with heroes and martyrs, Netanyahu explaining that Jewish life in the Diaspora is fragile and prone to assimilation.”23
From the late 1960s to the present, historians have begun to shed light on vast areas of converso life that do not fit the sweeping generalizations of earlier histories, for instance Baer’s binary model of “corrupt elites” versus “faithful folk” and Castro’s notion of collective mentality. Recent studies of inquisitorial dossiers have uncovered more confusion and disunity among the converso rank-and-file than Baer’s idealizing view could ever allow. These and other works have also challenged the relatively narrow chronological and geographical parameters of earlier treatments. For example, eminent Hispanists such as Antonio Dominguez Ortiz and Julio Caro Baroja have ventured (however briefly) beyond Iberia to survey the history of exiled conversos.24 Yosef Yerushalmi, Yosef Kaplan, and Herman Prins Salomon, all students of Jewish history (although Salomon is a linguist and literary critic by training), have produced works that trace the lives of individual conversos before, during, and after they “returned” to Judaism in exile.25 For their part, students of intellectual and cultural history (Gershom Scholem, Yirmiyahu Yovel, J. A. Van Praag, and Israel S. Révah, to name a few) have explored the manner in which former crypto-Jews and their descendants may have injected distinctively Hispano-Christian concerns into the mainstream of Jewish life.
The blurring of historiographical boundaries that I have sketched reflects at least three important shifts in scholarly approaches to the history of Judeoconversos that have occurred since the 1960s.
First and foremost, the tendency of earlier scholars to measure the moral worth of conversos in light of the latter’s supposed adherence to reified notions of Hispanicity and/or Jewishness has somewhat subsided; so too have egregious attempts to claim or disown conversos on behalf of given national camps. These changes should not be overstated, especially as there still exists a marked tendency among some historians to portray conversos as Jewish heroes. Yet the changes do suggest a partial repudiation of grand (national) narratives in favor of more nuanced evaluations that focus narrowly on specific conjunctures of historical factors. With latter-day approaches26 has come the possibility of confronting Judeoconversos as an analytical challenge in their own right.27 Today, investigators need not subordinate the study of conversos to explorations of larger and “more important” phenomena—say, the saga of Sephardim or of the Spanish Inquisition. Ironically, by concentrating on the historical particularity of Judeoconversos, scholars may also discern ways in which New Christians resembled their Jewish and Old Christian contemporaries, and thus begin to unearth lines of fundamental continuity in the collective experiences of early modern Jews, conversos, and Old Christians.
Second, a new interest in the complex inner lives of Judeoconversos has emerged. This trend has a precedent in the work of Castro, who underlined the need to take psychological factors into account when formulating histor ical explanations about conversos. In particular, the challenge of reconstructing the spiritual trajectory of converso refugees as continuous wholes has forced scholars to follow their subjects across Europe, and thus to disregard 1492, the territorial borderline of the Iberian Peninsula, and other such imaginary dividing lines between Hispanic and Jewish history. Fortunately, Castro’s successors have demonstrated greater awareness than he of the fact that the behaviors and motivations of conversos spanned a wide spectrum, and that all of these behaviors and motivations were at least partially rooted in larger historical circumstances, not in national essences, as Castro’s analysis tends to suggest. Furthermore, some historians now acknowledge as a matter of course that many conversos were, to borrow Van Praag’s phrase, “souls in dispute” (or “divided souls”) whose self-identity was never a given; indeed, this identity was often in flux.28 In this regard, Yerushalmi has noted that what is surprising is not that several converso refugees stumbled along the road to Judaism, but that a large number of the exiles adapted to Jewish life without major incident.29
Third, a new emphasis on social history has allowed scholars to broaden their analytical scope to include considerations of place, demography, economy, social class, and other causal factors that transcend the traditional foci of older political and intellectual histories. To cite a few examples: Yosef Kaplan, Jonathan Israel, Brian Pullan, James Boyaijan, Haim Beinart, and Julio Caro Baroja have made extensive use of communal records, state documents, inquisitorial cases, and private commercial records to compose sociological portraits of, respectively, the Amsterdam Jewish community; Sephardi enclaves and commercial networks throughout Europe and the Americas; the interaction of Venetian Jews and conversos; converso bankers; the New Christian contingent in Ciudad Real; and, finally, Castilian conversos during the reign of Philip IV.30
The recent stress on social history promises to correct a traditional overemphasis on the lives and works of highly articulate thinkers and polemicists of converso origin such as Spinoza, Uriel da Costa, and Menasseh ben Israel. The closer investigators have hovered over the rich texture of life among ordinary conversos, the more their studies have revealed variations from the main patterns of converso acculturation. For instance, in his 1983 study on the Venetian Inquisition, Pullan alone unearthed dozens of instances in which otherwise unexceptional conversos failed to develop stable religious identities or were simply incapable of assuming constructive roles within their host communities. One of Pullan’s chapters focuses on people who reverted to Christianity after erratic excursions into Judaism.31 As early as 1943 and 1961, respectively, Cecil Roth and Israel Révah discovered similar examples of “deviance” in Lisbon and Rouen, where New Christian renegades perpetrated wide-scale denunciation against fellow conversos.32 Much more recently, Jaime Contreras depicted a veritable hornet’s nest of informers and counterinformers in his microscopic study of the converso communities of sixteenth-century Murcia and Lorca.33 For their part, Isaiah Tishby, Yosef Kaplan, and Matt Goldish have unearthed evidence of disaffection and nonconformity among Sephardim of the seventeenth century, particularly among immigrant conversos in London, thus sharpening our view of the difficulties of collective Judaization in that corner of the converso Diaspora.34 Kaplan is, to my knowledge, the only investigator to have approached the phenomenon of return to the Iberian Peninsula in his pioneering articles, “The travels of Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam to the ‘Lands of Idolatry’ (1644–1724)” and “The Struggle Against Travelers to Spain and Portugal in the Western Sephardi Diaspora.”35
The present study both complements and builds upon the efforts of the three last-mentioned authors by broadening and deepening their focus on ostensibly marginal conversos. Without losing sight of the entire western converso Diaspora, I shift attention to France, for which few historical studies on converso dissidents exist. Furthermore, where Tishby, Kaplan, and Goldish merely