Parallel Histories: Muslims and Jews in Inquisitorial Spain

17. From Heterodoxy to Modernity?

151 chapter 17 FROM HETERODOXY TO MODERNITY? T he disappearance of the institutions and rituals of normative Judaism combined with Inquisitorial repression, the strength of Catholic indoctrination, and the sheer weight of majority opinion not only to weaken the attachment of would-be judaizers to the orthodox forms of Jewish belief. Such pressures also moved some of these desperate souls in altogether unexpected spiritual directions. One might begin to chart this terrain by noting the silences as well as the emphases that issued from this unique religious context. Even a brief glance reveals that early modern Spanish and Portuguese Jews contributed little to many of the key debates of Judaism held elsewhere. While this is hardly a surprise given the circumstances, nevertheless there were certain subjects that one might expect to have had a deep resonance among judaizing conversos, yet which seem to have produced little echo. Foremost among these was messianism. Many Iberian Jews of the fifteenth century trusted in the imminent appearance of the Messiah. The most notorious antisemitic treatise of the period, Espina’s Fortress of Faith, warned Christians that Jewish eschatological hopes were on the rise, especially following the Muslim conquest of Constantinople in 1453, which many read as an augury of impending judgment. Messianism, moreover, was one of the more 152 Parallel Histories persistent themes in the works of the most prominent Jewish writer of the expulsion generation, Isaac Abravanel. He even provided a precise date for the much-awaited arrival, 1503. (When the End of Days did not take place, he updated his prediction to 1504, again without effect.) Yet what is most striking is the way in which messianism receded as a perceptible current among Iberian judaizers. There were, to be sure, several cases of eschatological fervor in the first two generations of conversos. The earliest of these took place in southeastern Extremadura during the opening decade of the sixteenth century. There at least three different groups of New Christians gathered in hope of divine deliverance from persecution. The leaders who preached this message included two women, one Inés from the town of Herrera del Duque and one Mari Gómez from Chillón, near Almadén. Their avowal that both the prophet Elijah and the Messiah were en route found ready listeners, and the Inquisition punished more than thirty defendants (most of them women) for their involvement in the movement. This episode was followed in the 1530s by the even more bizarre case of David Reuveni. A “small dark man” who arrived in Venice in 1524 announced to the four winds that he had come from the “Desert of Habor” (a site mentioned in II Kings 17:6) with a mission unto both Jews and Christians . He managed to obtain an audience with the pope, whom he sought to enlist in an alliance to free the Holy Land from the Muslims. After a stay in Portugal, from whence he was expelled due to the overly enthusiastic response he provoked among the kingdom’s New Christians, he returned to Italy where he was finally imprisoned and exposed as an impostor. He somehow turned up in the Extremaduran town of Llerena, where the Inquisition burned him in 1538. The same fate befell his best-known follower, Diogo Pires, a prominent converso and royal secretary who, after undergoing circumcision, changed his name to Solomon Molcho and became a kabbalist and a messianic figure on his own. What most struck contemporaries about this extraordinary tale was not only the ease with which both Reuveni and Molcho were able to arrange interviews with leading figures throughout Europe. It was also the sheer excitement their message—which combined calls for spiritual reform with plans for an unprecedented alliance between Christians and “biblical” Jews to defeat the shared enemy of Islam—generated in the Iberian peninsula as well as in Italy. Clearly this messianic tandem struck a chord among Iberian conversos From Heterodoxy to Modernity? 153 as well as in Jewish communities elsewhere. Yet apart from these and a few other instances, messianism played a much smaller role in the history of Spanish and Portuguese judaizing than one might expect. It is telling that while the main messianic movement of early modern Judaism—the tumultuous attempt of Sabbatai Zevi to proclaim himself the Messiah which ended in failure and his conversion to Islam in Istanbul in 1666—found enthusiastic adepts among sephardim throughout Europe, it is...