Troubled Souls: Conversos, Crypto-Jews, and Other Confused Jewish Intellectuals from the Fourteenth through the Eighteenth Century (review)

What I like best about the internet is the way it brings people together. No matter how obscure or eccentric a person’s interests may be, by diligently surfing the net he or she is sure to find like-minded people—perhaps even soulmates—somewhere in cyberspace. That explains how this weird little book came to be. Charles Meyers, a retired librarian, had spent over twenty years researching the life of Dr. Hector Nuñes, a Portuguese-born converso physician and merchant who lived in London during the second half of the sixteenth century. Although Nuñes performed important services for the British crown, using his commercial activities as a cover for espionage in Portugal and Spain—and desperately sought to be fully accepted as an English Christian—his adopted countrymen continued to despise him as a Jew and a foreigner. Meyers saw Nuñes as a sort of prototype for so many other Jews in the recent past whose attempts at assimilation were rebuffed. Their inability either to completely shed their Jewish identity or to successfully adopt a Christian one relegated them to a lonely, anxiety-ridden no-man’s-land. Meyers wondered whether other historians had come across similar cases, and he eventually searched the internet for answers. There he encountered Norman Simms, an American- born scholar who teaches at the University of Waikato (New Zealand). Simms had spent many years searching for evidence in English literature of the persistence of some residue of Judaism there between the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 and their resettlement in 1650. What he found was a number of writers (including, he believed, Geoffrey Chaucer!) who, though nominally Christian, revealed a vestigial Jewish cultural identity in their writings. He invented the term “fuzzy Jews” to describe these individuals. Simms and Meyers then began a lively discussion on the internet with other scholars working on related topics, and eventually came up with the idea of publishing an anthology of their work.

Unfortunately, the resulting book also resembles the internet in what we might term its promiscuity, for lack of a better word. What I mean is that this book, like the internet, is completely lacking in scholarly standards and formality. It consists of eleven articles— ranging in length from seven to thirty-four pages—and contains a preface by the noted Hispanist David Gitlitz and an afterword by the novelist Richard Zimler. The contributors range from community activists with no scholarly credentials to graduate students and a few well-known academics, and they represent eight different countries. As one would expect, the quality of the articles is extremely uneven. Perhaps the best example of the book’s lack of scholarly criteria is the fact that its first article, Carlos Barros’s “The Accepted Other: Tolerance towards the Jews in Medieval Galicia,” is almost completely unrelated to the book’s supposed subject. Furthermore, Barros—like several of the other contributors—is not a native speaker of English, and his article contains numerous mistakes in grammar and spelling which the editors have not bothered to correct. Norman Simms has translated several of the articles in the book from French or Spanish; these translations are extremely unidiomatic and inaccurate, sometimes conveying the opposite of the meaning obviously intended by the author. Apparently no one took the trouble to proofread the book; there is hardly a page in it that isn’t marred by errors of one kind or another. Even more seriously, the book is made almost unreadable by the fact that the main body of the text is printed in a tiny 9-point font, with the notes in an even smaller one. The only way I was able to read it to write this review was by making an enlarged photocopy.

Carlos Barros’s article seeks to explain why there was so little antisemitism in medieval Galicia...