- Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood and Faith by Ronnie Perelis
This book focuses on three autobiographical texts produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by natives of Spain and Portugal [End Page 581] who at some point in their lives became avowed judaizers: Luis de Carvajal the Younger (1567–1596), an itinerant peddler and governor’s nephew whose life ended on the Inquisitorial pyre of New Spain (in what is today Mexico); the Portuguese merchant Antonio de Montezinos (1604–1647), who formally embraced Judaism in Amsterdam; and the tradesman Manuel Cardoso de Macedo (1585–1652), who identified as an Old Christian and eventually converted to Judaism in Hamburg after a brief interval in England and Spain as an adherent of Protestantism. All of these individuals were “caught within the matrix of inquisitorial persecution, expanding global trade, and crypto-Jewish activity in the early modern period” (1).
Perelis seeks to deepen our knowledge of crypto-Jews by highlighting how crucial family was to the spiritual struggles and pragmatic choices of these individuals and by exploring their narrative strategies, particularly the deliberate ways in which they represented themselves in their egodocuments, a process the author understands as “self-fashioning.” He aims to analyze his texts through the lens of family within the context of the Atlantic world and to understand his subjects within their historical moment. Perelis’s project began in 1997; two of the five chapters were previously published in scholarly venues.
The main problem with Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic is that it undertakes analysis without grounding in the historical context, a void the author often fills with layman’s psycho-history. This shortcoming is most evident when he discusses his two main themes, crypto-Judaism and the family. Perelis never defines family, a highly varied and changeable concept and institution, nor does he allude to the prodigious literature on the evolution of the early modern family published since the 1970s. Rather, Perelis sees the three narratives as “driven to a great extent by a charged Freudian-style family romance” and presumes that the Atlantic family was premised on a solidarity, sentimentality, and attachment that could only be torn asunder by spiritual strife, “adolescent” rebellion, or a search for substitute “father figures.” (124, 42, 84) “Blood may be thicker than water,” he writes, “but that thickness can be dissolved through neglect and betrayal” (59). This unexamined assumption ignores the hierarchies, economic imperatives, and violent coercion at the heart of the early modern family.
Nor does Perelis reckon with the enslaved or free people of African and Indigenous origins who often formed part of the households of the era. The spiritual traditions of crypto-Muslims, Africans, and Indigenous peoples, collectively a major preoccupation of Atlantic historiography, do not make any appearance in this book. Perelis depicts his subjects as circulating within a binary Jewish-Christian world and deems their [End Page 582] embrace of Judaism as “heroic” and their Christianity as either experimental or a legacy of force (22). Despite the book’s title, the author fails to engage with the paradigm of the Atlantic World, which historians understand as a unified system held together by the regular exchange of people, ideas, technology, goods, and disease. For Perelis, the Atlantic World is simply a region. The mislabeling of his Portuguese and Spanish subjects as Sephardim, a category they never would have applied to themselves, is another symptom of the book’s ahistorical framework.
It would have been fruitful to discuss these three texts within the context of Stuart Schwartz’s argument that early modern expressions of sympathy for non-Catholic religions were a carryover from the latitudinarianism of so-called Golden Age Spain. Perelis might also have alluded to David Graizbord’s contention that the Inquisition’s Jewish-descended victims strove not to adhere to their ancestral faith, but rather to seek social, spiritual, and economic equanimity wherever they could find it. Instead, Perelis seems compelled by the stale idea, first formulated in the mid-twentieth century, that the conversos most deserving of our scrutiny...