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

A historical anthropologist at the Collège de France (now emeritus), Nathan Wachtel has spent much of his professional life bringing to light what he calls the “ʻunderground history’ of the Americas, between memory and forgetting” (15). A recent addition to this initiative is The Faith of Remembrance: Marrano Labyrinths, originally published in 2001 as La foi du souvenir: Labyrinthes marranes (Seuil), and newly translated by Nikki Halpern. This vast work guides the reader through a hall of mirrors emblematic of the complex and contradictory world of New Christians of Spanish and Portuguese origin throughout Iberian America from the end of the 1500s to the first half of the 1700s. Variously called Marranos and conversos, New Christians were baptized Catholics converted from Judaism, often forcibly; significantly, this designation also applied to their descendants. Thoroughly familiar with both the historical context in which eight such individuals lived as well as their respective Inquisition trial records, Wachtel weaves together their actions, beliefs, words, and even sighs and screams in order to save from oblivion the conflicted worldview of New Christians accused of Judaizing heresy.

In his preface to the book, Yosef Kaplan, the eminent historian of post-1492 Iberian Jewry, outlines the themes that Wachtel subsequently develops: the geographic mobility and religious syncretism of New Christians in their global diaspora during the early modern period, and the “cult of remembrance” by which these baptized Catholics expressed varying degrees of crypto-Jewish identity (xiii). Indeed, Kaplan notes that, thanks to Wachtel’s knowledge of Inquisition testimony and his ability to make the reader feel a witness to the trials of the victims, “these Marrano characters become three-dimensional . . . revealed to us in their full humanity, with their passions and their intrigues, their hopes and despair, their daring and their weakness” (xiv). Wachtel states in his introduction that the cross-section of men and women whose cases he meticulously analyzes is a “portrait gallery” pieced together using often disparate biographical information that shows how these secret Jews “each in his or her own way inescapably expresses something collective” (15, 16). The subsequent “portraits” adhere to this claim, owing to the dissimilarity in background and knowledge of normative Judaism of these individuals, and to the recurrent features of a shared identity that unify them.

Reflecting the themes suggested by the title of the book, the introduction leads the reader into the labyrinthine world of Marrano existence and explains how a small number of people whose families had not practiced Judaism openly for multiple generations adhered to remnants of this faith in ways that sometimes cost them their lives. Clarifying several misconceptions regarding Iberian crypto-Jews, Wachtel shows that most New Christians prosecuted by tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition in the Americas were in fact Portuguese, and also that “crypto-Jewish” was not necessarily a correlative term for “Jewish.” In contrast to his focus in subsequent chapters on the lives of inquisitorial victims, here Wachtel contextualizes the place of New Christians in the era of exploration and argues for their modernity. Comparing former Jews in Iberia of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with Jews in other parts of Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth, he argues convincingly that both played important roles in their respective societies and that both were persecuted because of an “irrationality supposedly justified by a blood logic” (1). His argument makes clear how popular resentment and fear of New Christians occasioned by their relative commercial prominence during the two centuries after the forced conversions in Iberia at the end of the 1400s motivated this “irrationality.”

Given that many Jews who left Spain in 1492 were those who refused to convert, crypto-Judaism there never developed to the extent it did subsequently in Portugal, where approximately half the exiles went. Despite their forcible conversion in that country four years later, its rulers generally left the converts alone until the arrival of the Inquisition in the late 1530s, creating the conditions for the development of a distinct...