Parallel Histories: Muslims and Jews in Inquisitorial Spain

15. Identity and Creativity

123 chapter 15 IDENTITY AND CREATIVITY I t is difficult, if not impossible, to speak of a converso identity in collective terms. This is not to say that New Christians altogether lacked a sense of belonging to a social category of their own, much less that they failed to recognize other members of the same group. Crypto-Jews in particular resolved the dilemma caused by the incompatible needs for secrecy and communal religious activity by inventing strategies for the identification of fellow judaizers. These included the use of coded language with which to test unknown persons. The xuetes of Mallorca, for example, referred to themselves as “servants of God” and waited for outsiders to catch the hint. And when an Extremaduran converso went to live in Madrid, his aunt there asked him “if he had his eyes open,” which he later acknowledged was a means of “declaring oneself” a secret Jew.1 But developing code words for recognition was a far cry from forging a collective identity understood in the usual sense of belonging to a stable community whose members were united by shared religious beliefs and practices, interlinked family ties, and close neighborly and economic relations. As noted above, such patterns quickly became rare following the initial crackdown by the Inquisition. By the seventeenth century the successful assimilation of the vast majority of Spanish conversos meant that most of the comparatively few New Christians 124 Parallel Histories who fit this bill were Portuguese. By increasing their visibility, their foreign origins did much to hamper their ability to follow the same route. A sense of converso identity on an individual or family level is a different matter, though. What needs stressing is how outside pressure shaped the range of choices open to New Christians. Converts and their descendants had no alternative: even the most convinced judaizers opted to profess Catholic beliefs and practices in public, while remaining loyal to Judaism in their heart of hearts. But what started as an either/or choice soon gave way to a wider range of possibilities. As one scholar has put it, there were four types of conversos: those who wanted to be Christian and have nothing to do with Judaism, those who wanted to be Jewish and have nothing to do with Christianity, those who wanted to be both, and those who wanted to be neither.2 The mere fact of having to face such choices forced many conversos to confront an existential dilemma of self-knowledge. One of the many paradoxes of the history of the conversos is that amid such harsh constraints some of them nevertheless took advantage of the situation to fashion themselves anew, both when converting to Catholicism and when “returning” to Judaism. Making such crucial decisions about one’s inner allegiances and loyalties meant posing fundamental questions to and about oneself. How was the converso to deal with his or her personal and family past? Was there no alternative to accepting that one’s ancestors were damned forever? Or could genuine conversion serve as the first step in the search for a retrospective redemption from which they might hope to benefit? Even closer to home, how should one deal with living relatives and friends, both those who clung to the former faith and those who moved on to a new one? How could one be sure that they would not let their own spiritual commitments override more earthly expectations of trust? As cruel as these psychological dilemmas could be, they issued from the existence of very real and pressing options within a context of violent constraint and all-too-evident jeopardy. Occasionally, a document appears which allows the historian to glimpse something of these choices and the reasons why they were made. One such text is the diary written from 1520 to 1559 by the Valencian merchant Jeroni Soria. At no point does Soria admit to being a converso, although his recording that the Inquisition had condemned a close relation for judaizing is suggestive enough. Much more interesting—remarkable, in fact—is the brief sentence wherein he notes Identity and Creativity 125 that as a child his father sent him to Genoa “so he could see if he was a Jew or where he came from.”3 The cryptic nature of this reference makes it impossible to know in which direction (if any) his father may have tried to influence his choice. Nevertheless, that some sort...