The Faith of Remembrance: Marrano Labyrinths by Nathan Wachtel (review)

Published a remarkable 12 years after its original French edition, this may be Nathan Wachtel’s best work. In the delay, there has been no loss of poignancy. Long a foremost expert on colonial Latin America, medieval and Early Modern Iberia, and their intersections, here Wachtel is at his most subtle and most riveting as storyteller and analyst. His mastery of Inquisition archival records in Portugal, Spain, and Mexico has brought him to a handful of stories of accused Marranos (secret observers of Jewish practice) that, woven together, help answer a question at the heart of identity in the Iberian world before 1830. Striking down the superficial binary implied in inquisitorial process that one could be either a “Jew” or a “Christian,” and approaching identity as fluid, Wachtel asks: “What did it mean to be a secret Jew?

The case of Fernando de Medina is typical of how Wachtel distills reams of archival evidence to do what few can: tell a good story. He moves the reader past the horror of inquisitorial trials to reveal that at issue for authorities were the most complex of theological, political, and cultural problems of empire. Arrested by the Mexico City Inquisition in 1691, it was not until 1699 that Medina was burned at the stake in an auto-da-fé. Why so long a process? Wachtel’s answer is that Inquisition hearings depended on drawn-out theological struggle and intelligence-gathering. They pitted inquisitors, trying to grasp the nature of the subversive threat, against the accused, jousting with his or her captors in an exercise that tested both the fluidity and fixed qualities of a prisoner’s identity, while revealing something larger about Marrano identities.

Medina taunted his captors. “There is no God,” he railed in late 1691, “neither divinity nor Trinity; gods are men of flesh like all the rest, and they eat and drink” (p. 179). Wachtel concludes that this is bigger than a rejection of Catholicism; it is a refutation of religion itself. Intellectually and theologically flummoxed, the inquisitors sometimes thought Medina mad, at other times rebellious. The court reporter noted that the prisoner had affirmed that he was Jewish but that he did not know whether God existed. Could Jewish identity depend on something other than religious affiliation? Wachtel concludes that the prisoner’s arguments reflect a “materialist and skeptical agnosticism” (p. 184) that incorporated a Jewish identity understood as “filiation, inheritance, sharing a communal destiny.” Drawing on Medina’s testimony and that of others, Wachtel goes even further; the Marrano’s Judaism helped craft the idea of ‘Nation.’ “As soon as belief in God disappears,” Wachtel continues, “belonging to the `Nation’ becomes secular, and faith is transformed into a cult of memory erected as an absolute obligation” (p. 185). Wachtel is proposing nothing less than that Marranos, on the periphery of empire, were heralds and progenitors of European modernity.

To understand the role secrecy played in identity formation, Wachtel ties the results of oral histories he conducted in 2000 and 2001 in Brazil to what he uncovered in Inquisition records. Like seventeenth-century Mexico, what distinguishes present-day Brazilian families with secret “Jewish” pasts from others remains the same as what puzzled Catholic inquisitors 400 years ago. It is not religious affiliation or theological reasoning so much as the practice of specific customs that may vary from household to household. In a family of six or more siblings, Wachtel found in Brazil, “one or two might return to Judaism, while the others explored multiple options: staying within clandestine Marranism, sincere Catholicism, agnostic indifference, conversion to one of the many Protestant churches. In the end, this diversity simply reproduced the complex situations of New Christian families of past centuries” (pp. 257–258). Ironically, the freedom to “reconvert” to Judaism exposes a paradox of memory and identity. At its most faithful, memory “betrays something essential by simultaneously revealing the final legacy of a tradition perpetuated obstinately and...