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8 | The Re-education of Marranos in the Seventeenth Century
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157 8 : The re-eduCaTion oF Marranos in The seVenTeenTh CenTury Originally delivered as the Rabbi Louis Feinberg Memorial Lecture in Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati, March 26, 1980. This piece originated as the Rabbi Louis Feinberg Memorial Lecture in Judaic Studies, hosted by the Judaic Studies Program at theUniversityof Cincinnati.Yerushalmi delivered the lecture in 1980, the year in which he moved from Harvard to Columbia to take up the chair named for his teacher Salo W. Baron. Up to this time, the bulk of Yerushalmi’s scholarly output, including both of his books, had been concerned with the Marranos.1 Many thousands of Jews converted to Christianity on the Iberian Peninsula in the century after the anti-Jewish riots of 1391. In 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain; all who remained were required to convert to Christianity. Five years later, the tens of thousands of Jews who had fled the expulsion to Portugal were forced to convert en masse in that country. Marranos were those among the converts or conversos who continued to maintain a Jewish identity in secret. It was they whom the Inquisition specifically targeted for their “judaizing” heresy. As a result, the lives of the Marranos or crypto-Jews were particularly tenuous. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many crypto-Jews left the Iberian Peninsula for Muslim or Protestant countries, particularly the Maghreb, the Levant, and the Netherlands, where they could once again adopt an open Jewish identity. By this period, all of them were at least fourth-generation Catholics and had been raised in places where Jewish education, books, and practice were strictly outlawed. The “re-education” of the Marranos, as reflected in the mechanisms they used to acclimatize themselves to the Jewish communities that they joined, was the subject of Yerushalmi’s lecture. Yerushalmi identified two kinds of activities by which Marranos committed themselves to their new Jewish lives. The first were “emotional, symbolic.” Marranos replaced their Christian names with Jewish ones, and some submitted themselves to a penitential flogging. Males underwent circumcision and married couples were remarried in a Jewish ceremony. The other kind of activity was a more intellectual endeavor. After the returning Marranos had openly recommitted to Judaism through the rituals mentioned above, they had to acquire knowledge of the Jewish tradition necessary to take 1. Some prefer the term “crypto-Jew,” because of the pejorative origin of the term “Marrano” in the Old Spanish word for “pig.” 158 | IberIa and beyond part in the Jewish community. A slew of books were published in Spanish and Portuguese during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to help them do so. Yerushalmi surveyed this new Jewish literature, which included Bibles, Hebrew grammars, histories, and other works. In particular, he described various halakhic manuals and the way they changed over time, initially being published in Ladino in Hebrew characters but before long being published in ordinary Castilian in Latin characters. The tone and methodology of this article were typical of Yerushalmi’s wider oeuvre. He covered vast ground by relying on evocative pieces of evidence to illustrate his careful generalizations. He used ostensibly arcane bibliographic details to shed light on shifts in attitude. He drew on a wide variety of historical sources, including rabbinical responsa, royal charters, and Inquisition records. He also evinced a special sensitivity to the inner experience of his subjects, as, for instance , in his reference to “the psycho-symbolic significance of names,” which hints at his later interest in Freud. It should also be noted that Yerushalmi made brief references in this article to the ongoing historiographical debate regarding the Marranos in Inquisitorial Iberia. Some historians, notably Benzion Netanyahu (mentioned in the introduction to chapter 5), claimed that the vast majority of the Spanish conversos led fully Christian lives and that the extent of crypto-Judaism described in the records of the Inquisition was a fabrication motivated by racial hatred.2 Others, such as Yitzhak Baer, claimed that the many Marranos identified firmly as Jews.3 Yerushalmi offered a somewhat more complex version of Baer’s approach, acknowledging the “metamorphosis” required for a Marrano to join the Jewish community. Here Yerushalmi took issue with the claims of Netanyahu by asserting that the Inquisition records constitute, on the whole, reliable historical evidence. In particular, he pointed out that these records provided Marranos in Iberia with the opportunity to learn about traditional Judaism by making public reference to Jewish practices and sources. Accordingly, “[w]e should disabuse ourselves,” he...