Dalia Kandiyoti
THE CONVERSO’S RETURN: CONVERSION AND SEPHARDI HISTORY IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020, ISBN: 978-1503612433
Reviewed by Jane Gerber*
The history of the Jews in Spain, especially the saga of the conversos, Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity in Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century, has been a source of fascination to contemporary writers in various cultures. The converso phenomenon has been deliberately employed as a literary metaphor and has served as a device through which to examine such diverse themes as national, personal, and sexual identity, modernization, and westernization, and governmental reform and political oppression. In The Converso’s Return Dalia Kandiyoti, Professor of English at CUNY, deftly examines the use of the converso as both a source of creativity and a template among selected American, Caribbean, Latin American, French, Spanish, and Turkish writers of fiction and memoir. Invoking a wide range of secondary studies and current literary theory, Kandiyoti’s book will be of interest to scholars in several disciplines as she illustrates what makes the converso experience so relevant to the literary imagination today.
The historical figure of the converso resonates in the twenty-first century. The conversos were medieval Spanish and Portuguese Jews tragically and violently deracinated from their Jewish moorings and condemned to a life of frequent migration and duplicity; they were spiritually caught in a state of indeterminate religious ambiguity and cultural crossings. Their hounding by the institution of the Inquisition, with its totalizing control over the hearts and minds of the Christians, resonates with writers experienced in the punishing ways of modern totalitarianism. The converso imaginary has thus been deployed by many writers, particularly in Latin America, as a metaphor for the contemporary search for roots in racially mixed societies and the quest for a sense of wholeness among Native Americans. It has also served as a lens through which the abuses of modern totalitarianism, including the disappearance of dissidents, can be dramatically examined. Both the strengths and weaknesses of this appropriation of Sephardic history are readily apparent: conversos are not a generalized symbol of universal anguish but very specific victims of Iberian ecclesiastical institutions, such as the Inquisition and the Dominican Order. The converso is the product of medieval Iberian bigotry and anti-Semitism. Their forced conversion and subsequent discrimination were the result of Spanish and Portuguese exclusionary policies and racist laws of “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre) that barred them from broad areas of Iberian and Latin American society and left many individual conversos and their descendants with a sense of incompleteness about their mysterious and obscured past.
From the 1391 pogroms against the Jews, the Spanish expulsion and forced conversions of the Jews in 1492, and the Portuguese forced conversion of the Jews to Christianity in 1497, the Jewish victims of these violent religious coercions had to hide their Jewish identities out of necessity. As a result they were frequently plagued by “divided souls” as the Jew who was stripped of community and history became a Christian, sometimes without belief. Conversos could be found in disproportionate numbers among Erasmians, Protestants, and other dissident Christians in sixteenth century Spain as well as among some of Iberia’s most important and creative literati and religious figures, such as de Rojas, probably Cervantes, and St. Teresa of Avila. The flight of conversos in considerable numbers to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Atlantic world did not resolve their religious ambiguity although it often meant the possibility of obscuring their Jewish origins as they moved further from the Iberian Peninsula. It also resulted in a dispersal and the burrowing of bearers of crypto-Jewish traditions in the Americas. Converso feelings of religious ambivalence or dissidence were best left unexpressed or concealed and their practices disguised lest the bearers be accused of “Judaizing” since any manifestation of Judaism was a crime tantamount to heresy and therefore subject to severe punishment, imprisonment, and even death. Thus, an elaborate obfuscation occurred, producing unusual manifestations of Jewish roots and long forgotten rites and rituals. The presence of Inquisition tribunals in Spain and Portugal until well into the nineteenth century embedded the converso tradition within the recesses of societies across the globe.
Descendants of forced converts were often haunted by the many blank pages in their family histories. These lacunae and silences have tempted twentieth century writers of both suspected converso and non-converso background to search for their family roots in Spanish towns and to seek DNA testing. For other writers, the characteristic mixing of peoples in the Americas (mestizaje) provided hints or possibilities of Jewish antecedents, tantalizingly resistant to reconstruction but tempting to explore metaphorically. As a result, the converso imaginary has provided a handy but frequently facile analogy for much modern angst: the dilemmas of converso identity are compared to personal conflicts of sexual identity; discrimination against the converso is glibly likened to Latino gender inequalities; and experiences of Inquisitorial investigation in sixteenth century Iberia are depicted as akin to modern dictatorships’ interrogations or to the Holocaust experience. Such appropriations of the converso’s history constitute a slippery slope that can lead to a misuse and trivialization or distortion of both the Sephardic past and the history of the Holocaust. Kandiyoti suggests the possibility of such danger in her analysis, yet seems reluctant or unwilling to explore it. Her book is intended as an analysis of how history is imagined in the literary domain and the “meaning and rhetoric of crypto-Jewish testimony” not an evaluation of the accuracy of the modern claims of converso descent or the skillful literary application of a literary trope.
An interest in reclaiming the benighted Sephardic Jews as the offspring of Iberia arose briefly in the seventeenth century but the movement to bring the Jews back to Spain proved ephemeral and deeply unpopular politically. By the mid-nineteenth century the issue of the historic experience of the converso and a related interest in the re-establishment of the political and cultural bonds between Sephardic Jews and Spain were raised in the contexts of Spanish colonialism in Europe and North Africa and of liberal reform in Spanish politics. The unique loyalty of the Sephardic diaspora to the language of medieval Spain evidenced in the Ladino of Ottoman Jews and the haketia of Moroccan Jews was a source of sentimental as well as of imperial interest to an expansionist Spain as it contemplated the loss of its global empire at the end of the nineteenth century. Only in the past few decades, however, have individuals actively sought to retrieve (or invent) Sephardic and specifically converso links in their family histories and to assume the heroic mantle of converso descent.
According to Kandiyoti contemporary interest in converso lineage has been fueled by several elements: the plethora of public programs, conferences, and novels surrounding the 1992 Quincentennial commemoration of the expulsion of the Jews; the personal explorations of a putative Jewish past among Latino writers in the American southwest and Latin America in the current atmosphere of heightened racial sensitivities; publicity attending the Spanish and Portuguese official discussion and invitations to repatriate descendants of those expelled in the parliamentary debates and legislation of 2015 in Spain and 2016 in Portugal; media publicity surrounding the return to converso and/or Jewish identity of public personalities; the general interest in genealogy and family roots characterizing American culture; and the global phenomena of mass migrations and refugees. Kandiyoti also includes more subtle causal factors in her considerations, such as the interest of novelists in the survival of the hidden and the literary vogue of mysticism. As a result of these many factors, the converso frequently appears in often surprising literary contexts whether in Canada or Chile, in the American southwest or contemporary Turkey where Jewish converts to Islam under the influence of the seventeenth century false messiah Sabbetai Zvi have become a recent subject of controversy in Turkish politics.
Kandiyoti’s selection of texts for analysis is shaped by her Sephardic interests as well as her expertise in methodological and literary issues of how to recuperate a past with little documentation. She is concerned with the “missing archives” of the past that become the building blocks of the novel or the memoir. Her authors utilize the converso metaphor as part of the current “memory boom” and quest for “belonging” or in order to explore myths and realities of “lost tribes.” For Kandiyoti, the secret Jew among the conversos is the alter ego of the modern literary subject. The converso condition provides an ideal medium for exploring convergences between the known and the unknown as well as themes of connectivity vs. exclusion. While victimhood is not compared overtly in the authors she has selected, the past and the present are often twinned or intertwined. Fiction, for Kandiyoti, plays the role of refining the hidden voices of the past. Unlike historical analysis, however, the novel seeks to create, not to produce or retrieve archives and memories. It is important to stress that none of Kandiyoti’s selected authors writes from the standpoint of an engagement within Sephardic or converso culture. Rather, the converso figure stands in for contemporary concerns in literature. Authors such as Alcalá or Obejas interweave the fate of the occluded indigenous native population of the Americas with the Sephardi Jew. Both are the victims of 1492. The heart of Kandiyoti’s study is literary analysis of authors, some Jewish, some Christian or Muslim, who happen to use the converso trope to convey personal journeys of one sort or another. She skillfully applies theories of Derrida, Foucault, and Edward Said, as well as the “memory studies” of Nora and Rothberg, to analyze her data. Her references from historians Yosef Yerushalmi, Anita Novinsky, and Yirmiyahu Yovel are lightly interspersed, as well.
In Chapter 3, the “Return to Sepharad,” Kandiyoti illustrates how the return to the “homeland” in search of personal roots in rural Spain can lead to destabilization of the individual seeker. The restoration of the judería and staging of pseudo-Sephardic holiday pageants in contemporary Spain form part of a commercialization and replication of convivencia, or co-existence of minorities in medieval Spain, for touristic purposes. Journeys to restored sites frequently evoke unanticipated visceral responses on the part of the seeker of individual family roots. Whether in the memoir of Doreen Carvajal The Forgetting River or the novel Mi nombre es Jamaica by José Manuel Fajardo, the yearning to belong and the quest for certitude produce involuntary somatic experiences (River, 132) that are interpreted as reenactments of an ancient persecution or faint evidence of a converso past in the absence of any extant family archives or signs of former Jewish residence in Carvajal’s ancestral Andalusian town. Fajardo’s novel illustrates the widespread preoccupation with Sephardi blood running through Spanish veins. His novel Mi nombre es Jamaica offers a meditation on the overlapping histories of the forced conversion of Jews and suppressions of Native Americans during the period of the conquests (141). Fajardo’s hero, Santiago, is a self-proclaimed born-again Jew while Doreen Carvajal, a talented journalist, is more skeptical about proving her Jewish identity but driven by a search for such an identity. Issues of blood discourse as the basis of identity raise serious questions left unanswered by Kandiyoti in her discussion of the literary technique of interweaving peoples and places and overlapping times and spaces as literary devices.
Chapter 4 examines the work of two Sephardic authors, Victor Perera who was born in Guatemala in 1934 and whose parents were from Salonica and Edgar Morin, the son of Salonican immigrants to France. Perera’s narrative of his return to Franco’s Spain forms just one of the many detours and dispossessions of the modern Sephardic Jew from South America. For both authors, converso consciousness serves as a bridge to a wider world of multiple expulsions and displacements. Both men expound the cosmopolitan nature of Sephardi culture and its submerged converso pasts and represent themselves as the remnants of secret Jews possessed of a complex inversion of identities.
Perhaps the most unanticipated use of the converso in literary works is found in Kandiyoti’s analysis of two works of fiction by contemporary Turkish writers Elif Shafak (Mirrors of the City, 1999, written in Turkish) and Yeshim Ternar (Rembrandt’s Model, 1998, in English) in Chapter 5. Both contemporary Turkish authors collapse the borders between Jew and Muslim as they contemplate the interactions of conversos and Moriscos, Muslim forced converts to Christianity; Sabbateans, Jewish converts to Islam; and the cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman Empire. The two books illustrate dimensions, and limitations, of the literary imagination not the facticity of the encounters among Jews and Muslims. Little historical evidence exists to link the two oppressed groups in friendly dialogue. In contrast to popular misconceptions, including by Kandiyoti, the Muslims were not expelled in 1492 but were forcibly converted to Christianity in the early sixteenth-century. They were repeatedly deported within Spain during the sixteenth-century, engaged in widespread armed revolts in Andalusia, and were ultimately expelled from Spain between 1609 and 1615. Little to no historical evidence exists of ongoing relations between conversos and Moriscos as the conversos attempted to assimilate into Spanish society and the Moriscos, in far greater numbers, attempted to persevere.
The cosmopolitanism in the novels of Shafak has gained her an international reputation and made her a cause célèbre and a cultural curiosity in Turkey in the 2000s. She spent many years in Spain in her youth where she discovered medieval Jewish mysticism. Her narrative attempts to construct a multicultural world out of diverse elements in vogue at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century in a Turkish society that was undergoing reconsiderations of twentieth century Kemalism and sought grandeur and political muscle in its more cosmopolitan, and expansionist, Ottoman imperial past. Shafak bends Sephardic history to create bonds between conversos and Moriscos and Jews and Muslims that are more reflective of the literary imagination than of the Ottoman past.
Yeshim Ternar, the other contemporary Turkish author examined by Kandiyoti, left Turkey in her youth and spent many years in Canada. Sabbatianism, and the resulting voluntary Jewish conversion to Islam in the wake of the conversion of the false messiah Sabbetai Zvi, is a key element in her book, Rembrandt’s Model, where she blends the gothic and the supernatural. Both books are representative of the genre of the global novel that was popular in the 1990s. Both authors introduce the reader to largely unknown converso and Jewish motifs for literary purposes. Both authors partake of the revivals of mysticism that were widespread in the U.S., Europe, and Turkey in the 1990s and the obsession with Sabbatians that gripped Turkey at the time.
The allusive figure of the converso permits endless literary representations and inventiveness. Kandiyoti’s analysis suggests some of these fictive permutations with skill and sophistication. Sephardism is different from actual Sephardic history; it invokes the history of Spain’s Jews to valorize multiculturalism and to explore current issues of identity and heterogeneity. This appropriation of the converso motif is not intended to produce authentic history, nor does it set out to perform that task. Its comparisons between different historical periods and places aren’t always natural and lend themselves quite easily to fiction. Kandiyoti’s work explores this literary device, in the process aptly demonstrating how converso history provides a platform for pleas for ethnic and religious co-existence across continents and different cultures.
* Jane Gerber is Professor Emerita of History at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.