Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (39 page)

Finally, I would like to conclude with a suggestion about the use of the marrano as a metaphor for a postmodern Jewish identity. We have had occa- sion to mention that self-ironizing hybridity was hardly the norm among con- versos and crypto-Jews. However, we are certainly entitled to discover a pro- found kinship between ourselves and those few conversos whom Stephen Gilman called “axiological orphans, abandoned by God and History.” Perhaps what we may learn from them above all is not so much their ironic perform- ance of selfhood but rather their hard-won resistance to the overpowering temptations of narcissism.

Notes

This essay was originally presented in an abridged form at the conference on “(Im)migrant Identities,” held at UC Davis on October 10–12, 1996. I would like to acknowledge Professor Norman Stillman, editor of the
association of jewish studies review
, for granting me permission to reproduce here some portions of my article “Abraham Miguel Cardoso’s Mes- sianic Theology: A Reappraisal.” I would also like to thank Harriet Murav whose current work on Russian Jews and converts to Russian Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century has provided me with several fruitful points of departure for my own study of conversos in early modern Spain.

1. Yerushalmi (1971) offers a full-length study of Isaac Cardoso, who broke with his younger brother over the question of Sabbatai Zevi’s status as Messiah.
   

2. By Cardoso’s own testimony, in a work dated to around 1700, he had written sixty “Treatises” (
   drushim
   ), “scattered throughout all of the Diaspora” (Scholem 1974:295). Sc- holem (1980) counted forty-six drushim (including several “letters”) extant in manuscript form. Isaac Molho and Abraham Amarillo (1960) published several texts, including an im- portant autobiographical letter. Most recently an edition of the important
   Derush ha- Skekhinah
   has been published in Wolfson (1998). In this essay I will use the following con- ventions for referring to the texts of Cardoso I use in this article:
   ‘al ha-Hamarah
   

   be-Saloniki
   , a section so titled by Scholem in his partial publication of Ms. Adler 2432 of the JTS; pagination refers to the reprinted version in Scholem (1974:278–96);
   ’iggeret Dalet
   , published in Molho and Amarillo (1960:202–35);
   Qodesh Yisra’el,
   published in Sc- holem (1960:253–70). All translations in this article of Cardoso’s texts are my own. Abra- ham Cardoso has been the subject of treatments by Graetz (1897:10:4); Bernheimer (1927); Scholem (1980); and Liebes (1980, 1981). Scholem (1974) contains a convenient collection of previously published editions of three Cardoso manuscripts, with introduc- tions and notes. There are numerous references to Cardoso and a lengthy description of Cardoso’s drush entitled
   Maggen ’Abraham
   in Scholem (1973:814–20, s.v. “Cardoso, Abra- ham Miguel” in the index), and further discussions can be found in Scholem (1971a, 1971b). There is a biographical entry in Scholem (1978:396–400). Other short treatments of Cardoso are found in Yerushalmi (1971, chapter 7); Kaplan (1989:210–19); Carlebach (1990:98–104); and Liebes (1993b:104–5, 1995). Cardoso’s academic background and theology is treated in Yosha (1988). For more recent treatments of Cardoso, see Wolfson (1998) and Rosenstock (1998).
   

3. This is the major argument advanced in the section of Cardoso’s
   Drush Kinuim
   pub- lished in Scholem (1980:345).
   

4. I use the plural “identities” deliberately, in order to make it clear from the outset that we cannot talk about a single, “essential” converso identity. For a very fine critique of “es- sentializing” tendencies in converso historiography, see Seidenspinner-Núñez (1996) and the comments of Gerli (1996:33–34). An earlier effort at deessentializing converso (and Jewish) identities while at the same time respecting the cultural and historical differences between conversos and Old Christians in the fifteenth century is made by Paul Julian Smith in “
   La Celestina
   , Castro, and the
   Conversos
   .” Smith’s strategy of using Levinas and Derrida to describe a nonessentialized “Hebraism” perhaps sheds more light on the cultural construction of the “Jew” in the late twentieth-century West than on fifteenth-century Spain, but the opposite course, a positivistic despair at finding any common converso men- tality, would be blind to the historical reality. For further discussion of methodology in the study of conversos, see the extremely valuable Critical Cluster in
   La corónica
   25.1 (1996), “Inflecting the
   Converso
   Voice”; the Forum in
   La corónica
   25.2 (1997) publishes respons- es that also contain valuable insights on methodological problems facing researchers in converso studies.
   

5. For a discussion of the Diltheyan influence on Bakhtin, see Matthew (1989:119, 124–25).
   

6. He writes, “Labeled by reviewers either as an ‘Existentialist’ or ‘New Critical’ inter- pretation, its close textual analysis of
   La Celestina
   seemed to them anachronistic” (Gilman 1972:3).
   

7. For a discussion of Espina’s very influential antisemitic treatise
   Fortalitium Fidei
   , see Netanyahu (1995:814–54).
   

8. I am indebted to Ben Orlove for drawing my attention to the review article of Vir- ginia Dominguez (1993) in which she invokes Sedgwick’s analysis of the “epistemology of the closet” to help explain the status of both the Jewish anthropologist and anthropologi- cal studies of Jews. Ben Orlove (1996) also speaks about the “Jewish closet” in relation to his own and others’ Jewish/anthropologist identity. For a treatment of Freud that also in- vokes the notion of a Jewish closet, see also Boyarin (1997:239).
   

9. See Sicroff (1960:290–97, esp. p. 292, n. 112) for a discussion of the proliferation in Spain during these years of treatises on the proper decorum of the nobleman, reflecting
   

   concern about “true” and “sham” nobility. My monograph on fifteenth-century Spain’s most influential intellectual, Alonso de Cartagena, bishop of Burgos, treats at length the attempted reconfiguration of the traditional notion of nobility by this converso (Rosen- stock 2002).
   

10. One may go so far as to claim that the converso mentality helped to inaugurate this modernity. Such, at least, is the claim that has been argued in much of the work of intel- lectual historians of early modern Europe like I. S. Révah (1959), Richard Popkin (1987), Yirmiyahu Yovel (1989), José Faur (1992), and Geoffrey Harpham (1994).
    

11. We find this tendency in Marks (1996), for example. Although there may be legiti- mate grounds for choosing to style one’s “postmodern” Jewish identity as “marrano,” the points of similarity between the two kinds of identity should not obscure the significant dif- ferences. Perhaps most important, conversos and crypto-Jews did not
    choose
    to be marranos.
    

12. See especially his discussion of Luis de Lucina (Gilman 1972:85, 139). Lucina was brought before the Inquisition, and one witness described him as “a well-read man given to extreme irony about the holy faith.” As an example, the witness went on to describe how Lucina, when addressed with the polite form “your mercy,”
    Vuestra Merced
    , replied, “Don’t call me Merced; I’m only a
    judío azino
    ,” a wretched Jew.
    

13. For one example of the effort to “pass” as an Old Christian, see Gilman on the de- scendants of Fernando de Rojas and their effort to conceal their converso origins (1972:26–51). On the crypto-Jewish subculture, see Gitlitz (1996) and Contreras (1991). On the interaction between conversos and normative Judaism in places like Amsterdam and Venice, see Bodian (1997); Kaplan (1989); and Yerushalmi (1971); for a discussion of this interaction in the Ottoman empire, see Rozen (1992).
    

14. Translation Goldberg’s (1979:102–3), as quoted in Mirrer (1996:74). It is interest- ing that this same linkage between circumcision and homosexuality was made a central fea- ture of the depiction of the Jew in the writing of Vasilii Rozanov (see Engelstein 1992:324–25). I wish to thank Harriet Murav for drawing my attention to the parallel be- tween the medieval text and Rozanov.
    

15. See Netanyahu (1995:848–54) for a summary of the entire work and Lazar (1997) for the text.
    

16. Thompson (1987:15); quoted in Mirrer (1996:73).
    

17. For other examples of the use of deprecatory feminizing images in relation to the converso, see Yovel (1998:12, 16) who quotes several poems from the fifteenth century in which a certain converso is described as “castrated” and as a “deflowered virgin.”
    

18. For a discussion of Iberian norms regarding homosexual behavior, see Perry (1990:123–26) and Trexler (1995:43–63).
    

19. Boyarin (1997, s.v. “Fanon, Frantz” in the index) makes extensive use of Fanon in his reading of the construction of the Jew in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth- century Europe. Boyarin characterizes the Jew as a colonial subject within European soci- ety, and I think we may extend this to the Jew in early modern Spain. Perry and Cruz (1991) draw a historical link between the treatment of both the Jewish and Muslim pop- ulations in Spain and the treatment of native populations in the New World: “The Inqui- sition had labored diligently in Spain to contain populations of
    conversos
    (Christianized Jews) and
    moriscos
    (Christianized Muslims), increasingly catechizing these communities and monitoring their external behavior. In the process of colonization—indeed, as an in- tegral part of this process—the measures of control adopted by the Counter-Reformation resurfaced in Spanish efforts to subdue native cultures in the New World” (p. x). See the
    

    present essay’s conclusion for some remarks about Boyarin’s periodization of the transfor- mation of the Jewish “colonial subject.”
    

20. See especially Bhabha’s “Interrogating Identity” and “The Other Question,” re- printed as chapters 2 and 3 of
    The Location of Culture
    (1994). I am grateful to Teresa de Lauretis for making available to me a manuscript of a work in progress, “Living in the Space of Otherness: Reflections on Frantz Fanon’s
    Black Skin, White Masks
    ” (delivered as a talk at UC Davis in November 1998), that deals at some length with the relationship be- tween Bhabha and Fanon.
    

21. For a discussion of crypto-Jewish messianism, see Edwards (1984); Kaplan (1989:373–77); and Gitlitz (1996:103–10). Many “sincere” conversos were attracted to and often helped to shape theologies that emphasized a “utopian” restoration of the “au- thentic” Christ-centered faith (under the influence of Erasmus) and/or apocalypticism. For the classic study of Erasmianism in sixteenth-century Spain and the role of the conversos in this movement, see Bataillon (1991, esp. pp. 194–96 on the conversos). For an overview of other Christian theologies attractive to some conversos, see Friedman (1994).
    

22. Yerushalmi (1971:303–6) offers evidence for the presence of messianism among former conversos in the seventeenth century before Sabbatai Zevi’s appearance. His analy- sis of Isaac Cardoso, Abraham’s older brother, shows, however, that not every former con- verso was attracted to Sabbatai Zevi.
    

23. For a discussion of Abraham Cardoso’s use of Christological motifs in his explica- tion of the debasement of Sabbatai Zevi, see Yerushalml (1971:335–41).
    

24. It is not as unusual as it may seem at first to make such a messianic claim or to have it made about someone. Some of R. Isaac Luria’s disciples considered him to have been the Messiah son of Ephraim (Scholem 1973:54–55, 70) and the same was believed about R. Samson b. Pesah of Ostropol, who was martyred during the 1648 Ukranian uprising (see Scholem 1973:82 and Liebes 1987:244). A certain R. Nehemiah Cohen (!) had claimed to be the Messiah son of Ephraim and had even engaged in a debate with Sabbatai Zevi over this claim (Scholem 1973:658–68).
    

25. Although traditionally the “main” Messiah is the Messiah son of David, Cardoso seems to have reversed this valuation in certain respects. See Rosenstock (1998) for a fuller account.
    

26. “On the Apostasy in Saloniki”; see note 2 above for bibliographic information re- garding this and the other texts of Cardoso referred to in this essay.
    

27. This is the name for the tenth sefirah, sometimes referred to as Shekhinah, and thus
    r’oshiy
    is both Cardoso’s nickname and his special name for the ninth sefirah, Yesod, the di- vine phallus.
    

28. Cardoso bases this upon Zoharic passages, and the fact that David, as king, is re- lated to the sefirah whose name,
    Malkhut
    , means “kingdom.”
    

29. Liebes (1993a:14 and passim) points out that in the
    ldra Rabba
    the Messiah is iden- tified with the configuration of Yesod.
    

30. Although it is certainly anachronistic to read “heterosexual” in the use of the term
    straight
    by Cardoso, it is not imposing a foreign sense on the word if we see it as having reference to the erect phallus, which Cardoso explicitly describes as “pouring out” in a straight line upon Malkhut, an unmistakable Kabbalistic reference to the seminal efflux of Yesod. Since, as a matter of fact, Cardoso claims that his power derives from Yesod and that of Sabbatai Zevi from the female Malkhut, perhaps it is not inappropriate to understand
    

    Cardoso to be reinforcing the heterosexuality of his “union” with Sabbatai Zevi and, thus, his “straightness.” I will return in the next section to the theme of the sexual juncture of the Cardoso qua Messiah son of Ephraim and Sabbatai Zevi qua Messiah son of David. It will become clear that there are homoerotic elements in this theme, but I would caution strongly against concluding that Cardoso is a “homosexual.” I am persuaded by recent scholarship that challenges the notion that homosexuality refers to a single transhistorical psychic disposition. (For a recent summation of the position, and special remarks about the construction of sexuality in rabbinic culture, see Boyarin 1997, esp. pp. 14–23.) On the other hand, I argue that Cardoso is not merely replaying the homoerotic themes that are so basic to the Kabbalah (see Wolfson 1994:369–77 and passim). These themes also serve Cardoso’s phallic narcissism.
    

31. Sander Gilman (1993:222, n. 2) refers to a seventeenth-century medical treatise that catalogs congenital circumcision as one of the birth defects of the penis. The possiblity of congenital circumcision is assumed in the Talmud; see, e.g. Talmud Bavli Yebamot 71a.
    

32. It is significant that the cause of the blemish is, in effect, Jewish ritual law, something that Cardoso believed would be transformed entirely in the messianic age. Cardoso is pos- tulating his own “congenital purity” as a third term that is higher than either the Jewish “pu- rity through law” or “purity through the blood of Christ” (Pauline “spritual circumcision”). It would be important to understand how Cardoso is constructing his own messianic iden- tity in relation to Paul, whose epistles he had, by his own testimony, studied.
    

33. See the evidence collected in the various essays in Kaplan, Méchoulan, and Popkin 1989.
    

34. We may perhaps invoke Popkin’s phrase “Marrano theology” to describe Cardoso’s messianism. Unlike La Peyrère, about whose messianic views Popkin coined the term, Car- doso is vehemently opposed to Jewish conversion, but he shares with La Peyrère the sense that the salvation of all the Jews depends upon a messianic drama that uses the crypto- Jewish condition as its major motif. For his discussion of La Peyrère’s “Marrano theology,” see Popkin (1987:22–24).