Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580-1700 (review)

David Graizbord's book examines the plight of "renegade conversos" in Spain and Portugal during the long seventeenth century. Conversos, or "New Christians," were baptized Christians of Jewish descent, and while a majority of them had been assimilated into Christian society (although to what degree remains a point of contention), a small minority of "renegades" chose to return to their ancestral faith, fleeing Christian Iberia and integrating themselves into Jewish communities abroad. A still smaller minority returned to the Iberian peninsula and often found themselves at the mercy of the Holy Office, and in some cases actively collaborated with inquisitional authorities as informers. Graizbord sets out to account for these unconventional behaviors and in the process provides an investigation into the vagaries of religious identity and a study of "cultural liminality."

Graizbord situates his analysis of these geographic and spiritual border crossers in opposition to a traditional historiography that sought to reveal the "truth" of converso identity in relation to reified national and confessional categories. Rejecting this kind of essentialism, Graizbord adopts a socio-cultural approach that facilitates a more nuanced appreciation of the varied psychological and economic forces at work in shaping the religious experiences of Iberian conversos.

One of the great strengths of Graizbord's Souls in Dispute is its detailed description of the complex networks within which his subjects circulated. By the mid-seventeenth century numerous Spanish and Portuguese conversos had fled the Iberian peninsula and settled in southwestern France, where many of them reverted to Judaism and participated in the refugee kehillot. An active trading relationship between Bayonne and Madrid, however, provided both motive and opportunity for some of these renegade conversos to return to Spain for extended periods. In doing so, they aroused the suspicions of both the Jewish and Christian communities. In Spain these returnees were bound to transgress Jewish law if they wanted to remain inconspicuous among the Christian flock, and thus their commitment to Judaism was questioned by their fellow expatriates. If, on the other hand, they were apprehended by Spanish or Portuguese authorities, they faced a barrage of interlocking prejudices: fears of judaizing, a widespread resentment of "wealthy" merchants, and xenophobia in general.

How did refugee conversos negotiate this welter of competing allegiances and identities? The Inquisition cases Graizbord examines contain fascinating testimony in which returnees sought to justify their tortuous religious trajectories. In some instances the accused ended up converting back to Catholicism and helping their inquisitors ferret out other crypto-Jews. Were these defendants mere opportunists, telling the authorities what they wanted to hear? Graizbord argues that this was not necessarily the case. Instead, according to Graizbord, this kind of "renegade behavior" involved a "complex process of self-fashioning" (p. 167) in which "the movement of individual conversos from one purportedly impermeable community of faith to another and back was not a stratagem, but an earnest choice born of a specific historical context and guided by a pragmatic religious mentality firmly rooted in that context" (p. 171).

Graizbord's use of the concept of "self-fashioning" to describe the contingency of converso identities is never fully elaborated. It would be helpful to have a more explicit discussion of how self-fashioning applies to the material presented here, or even to see some engagement with recent critiques of the self-fashioning paradigm, such as John Martin's Myths of Renaissance Individualism. Indeed, Martin's notion of the "prudential self" bears a striking resemblance to the kinds of identity formation described in Souls in Dispute.

To be fair, the author did not undertake to provide an analysis of early modern selfhood in general, and it is perhaps a testimony to the richness of his subject matter that one can envision many possible comparisons to be made and directions for further study. In the final analysis, Graizbord has written a superb book that will be of interest to Hispanists in...