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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Marranos were Spanish or Portuguese Jews who converted to Christianity at the time of the Spanish Inquisition to avoid being massacred or forced to flee but who continued to practise Judaism in secret. They were persecuted by the first racist blood laws but the water of forced baptism was not enough to make them assimilate. Donatella Di Cesare sees the marranos as the quintessential figures of the modern condition: the marranos were not just those whom modernity cast out as the 'other', but were those 'others' who were forced to disavow their beliefs and conceal themselves. They became 'the other of the other', doubly excluded, condemned to a life of existential duplicity with no way out, spurned by both Catholics and Jews and unable to belong fully to either community. But this double life of the marranos turned out to be a secret source of strength. Doubly estranged, with no possibility of redemption, the marranos became modernity's first true radicals. Dissidents out of necessity, they inaugurated modernity with their ambivalence and their split self. And their story is not over. By treating the history of the marranos as a prism through which to grasp the defining features of modernity, this highly original book will be of interest to a wide readership.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
The Last Jews: To Begin
Anarchiveable
Romantic Heroes or Cowardly Renegades?
Esther and Another Sovereignty
Convert and Flee!
When It All Began
Between Silence and Nostalgia
‘New Christians’?
The Other of the Other
An Existential Duplicity
The Discovery of the Self
Water and Blood: From Toledo to Nuremberg
The Great Purge
Flight and Withdrawal
The Theology of the Marranos
Teresa of Ávila and the Interior Castle
‘Válete por ti!’
An Insult and Its Fantastic History
The Planetary Archipelago and the Anarchic Nation
The ‘New Jews’, between Livorno and Amsterdam
Messianic Sparks
Spinoza, Democracy, the Freedom of the Secret
The Political Laboratory of Modernity
Marranism in the Third Reich
The Counter-History of the Defeated and the Revenge of the Marranos
‘The Marrano is a Spectre I Love’
The Secret of Remembrance – The Recollection of the Secret
To Find Out More
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
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Marranos
The Other of the Other
Donatella Di Cesare
Translated by David Broder
polity
Originally published in Italian as Marrani: L’altro dell’altro. © 2018 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Turin
This English edition © 2020 by Polity Press
Front cover artwork: Rivera, Diego (1886-1957): French Intervention and the Empire under Maximilian (1862–1867) – The Porfirian Era (1876–1910). Left section of ‘From the Conquest to 1930’, 1929-1935. Mural, West wall. Mexico City, National Palace. © 2020. Photo Schalkwijk/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4205-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Di Cesare, Donatella, author. | Broder, David, translator.Title: Marranos : the other of the other / Donatella Di Cesare ; translated by David Broder.Other titles: Marrani. EnglishDescription: Medford : Polity Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “Why the story of the exile is the heart of the modern condition”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020012860 (print) | LCCN 2020012861 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509542031 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509542048 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509542055 (epub) | ISBN 9781509543564 (adobe pdf)Subjects: LCSH: Marranos--History. | Jews--Persecution--Europe--History.Classification: LCC DS123 .D5313 2020 (print) | LCC DS123 (ebook) | DDC 305.8/92404--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012860LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012861
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Esther had still kept it a secret that she was a Jew. She had not told anyone about her family background.
Book of Esther, 2, 20
Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.
Walter Benjamin1
Claims have also been advanced to the effect that the question of marranism was recently closed for good. I don’t believe it for a second. There are still sons – and daughters – who, unbeknownst to themselves, incarnate or metempsychosize the ventriloquist specters of their ancestors.
Jacques Derrida, Marx & Sons2
1.
Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ in
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
, New York, Schocken, 1969, p. 253.
2.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Marx & Sons’ in Michael Sprinkler (ed.),
Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s
Specters of Marx, London, Verso Books, 1999, p. 262.
The Last Jews: To Begin
To speak of marranos, in a historical sense, is to refer to the Jews in Iberia and the Spanish dominions who were forced to convert to Christianity in order to escape exile or death. A result of the political violence and religious intolerance that was symbolized in most extreme form by the Spanish Inquisition, marranism created a lacerated identity, tragically split between two irreconcilable ties of belonging – one external and official and another intimate and hidden. Even once these ‘new Christians’ had been christened, they remained separate from the ‘old Christians’, who suspected them of secretly observing the Jewish rites. No auto da fé was enough. Suspicions regarding the marranos – who, despite everything, continued to appear unassimilable and extraneous – became so intense that the first racist laws of the modern age were proclaimed, as blood became the criterion for the protection of a supposed purity. The gates of universal brotherhood thus slammed shut.
Persecuted, hunted and tortured, the marranos were pushed back into a cryptic, subterranean existence that compromised their life and undermined its very conditions. They were trapped in a hybrid space, banished into a no-man’s-land. There, they kept their inaccessible secret over the centuries, even as they were accused of being infidels, liars and traitors. But this immemorial devotion would have paradoxical results. For the crypto-Judaism, which was conserved at such great pains, ended up holding on to almost nothing of the ancient faith. The marranos stood at a remove from other Jews, with whom their relations weakened or even vanished. They instead elaborated a religion and a way of life that rested on unstable foundations of ambivalence and dissent – as did their identity itself. It was no longer clear to the outside observer whether the marranos were heretical Christians or secret Jews. Nonetheless, a fervent messianic expectation, sustained by the memory of the future, lit up their dark night of exile. Isolated, excluded and segregated, they persisted in their secret, convinced that they were the last Jews on earth.
The marranos long remained clandestine, in the most distant and remote sites of oppression. In some striking cases, they would re-emerge only in the twentieth century. Many others returned to Judaism long before then, whether re-joining old communities or founding new ones. The effect was a disruptive one. For within themselves the marranos bore the seed of doubt, the ferment of opposition. Compelled to be dissidents, they gave rise to radical thinking. Having long lived on the edge, on the border, the marranos were extreme and eccentric – and they fed the emergence of messianic movements that shook institutional religion. Their return marked a profound rupture in tradition, indeed one that could not be healed. From this rupture, Jewish modernity was born.
Having come out into the open, those who considered themselves the last Jews revealed themselves to be the first moderns. The split self, the impossibility of a full belonging, a constitutive extraneousness – this is the marranos’ indelible legacy. With them, the myth of identity implodes and shatters.
It is thus necessary to go beyond this term’s restrictive historical meaning. In so doing, one can proceed to investigate a phenomenon that has not yet reached its conclusion, just as modernity itself has not been exhausted. This is all the more true given that, in refusing to divulge their secret, the marranos rendered their history invisible, making it impossible to produce a historiography. What, then, remains of the marranos, outside the archive of memory? To reflect on marranism in its complex and articulated sense, retracing its singular paths – without condemnation, but also without apologias – thus means to probe the very foundations of modernity.
Anarchiveable
The marranos’ history is not over. To put the final seal on it would, indeed, be a further violence – as if to decree that they had irrevocably disappeared. In recent years, there have been multiple cases of people, sometimes in tragic circumstances, detecting hidden traces of an unknown past. They have guessed, intuited or – thanks to some vague clue – re-awakened the lacerated memories that had been headed towards outright disappearance. These memories were prompted by a letter from a distant relative, a murmured deathbed confession, a photograph discovered by chance, an object appearing in a drawer, the re-evocation of an ancient rituality and of a singular gesture. Above all a name, the family name, which conceals within itself – impenetrable and yet still eloquent – the vicissitudes of entire generations. The marranos of both today and yesterday come back out into the open.
Scattered everywhere, from the south-west of the United States to the north-east of Brazil, from Portugal to Italy, invoking that practice of resistance and memory that has allowed them to survive – over and above any traumatic erasure – they demand not to be condemned to the archives. They ask this out of responsibility towards the secret whose memory they bear. They are, by calling, an-archiveable [anarchiviabili]. For they have confronted oblivion and challenged the very basis of arché, the principle of the archive, the order of archiving. Anarchically, they shrink from the remote past of antiquity, as they instead lay claim to a future perfect. And this is the future entrusted to a counter-history of those whom history has forgotten, already almost defeated by the compulsion to find refuge in clandestinity. How, then, can their testimony be recovered? How can they be brought out of the crypt? How can their name be redeemed?
The questions pile up. And, in their own paradoxical way, they reveal the fascinating and enigmatic figure of the marrano, who ingeniously evades any attempt at capture. This has been an irritation to more than one historian. Their inclination is to put an end to the matter by giving a definition of the marrano. They thus force the marrano to declare her identity once and for all and confine her to a closed book. Enough, then, with these marranos! And enough with those who would purport to trespass any further and extend the marranos’ presence.
In recent years, however, marranism has left the dominion of official history. Marranos are, indeed, known as navigators of borders. Marranism has come to arouse enormous interest among philosophers, anthropologists, novelists and psychoanalysts. In fact, it was a historian – Jacques Revel – who raised the question of the different modes of being marrano. He both widened its horizontal semantics and marked out its chronological verticality – and, ultimately, its durability. Does there exist a marrano condition? If so, what are its characteristic traits? The marrano ought to be seen, more than as a terminal figure, as an initiating one, who gives rise to a new era of Jewish history and, beyond that, to modernity itself. Yet the modernity to which the marrano gives rise is not a conciliatory and harmonious one, but rather one criss-crossed by an irreparable dissonance. From this flows a long tradition of revolt – one yet to reach its conclusion.
This is why it is possible to detect, within the troubling and spectral figure of the marrano, what Giorgio Agamben has called an ‘exemplary paradigm’. Just like the Homo sacer or the Muselmann, the marrano is both inscribed in history and exceeds its limits. Through her exemplarity she makes it possible to read the phenomena of the present, as she casts light on connections and family ties that may otherwise fall into oblivion.
Romantic Heroes or Cowardly Renegades?
There is perhaps no other figure open to such diverse interpretations. With their singular fate and their unusual double-sided character, the marranos have always brought divided responses, prompting contrasting evaluations. Even their place is not wholly clear. Do they belong to Spanish, or perhaps Portuguese history? Or to Italian or Dutch history? More fundamentally, however, the marranos were the first cosmopolitans. What, then, ought to be said about Jewish history? Should the marranos not be protagonists in this history, at least in part?
In the old ghettos where they spent their existence in study, fear and expectation, the eastern Jews maintained a vague yet hardy memory of the legendary splendour, the prestige and the ostentatiousness of the Sephardim – the Spanish and Portuguese Jews. Does the exploration of the most obscure recesses of the Kabbalah – Jewish mysticism – not, perhaps, owe something to them? And how could one forget the name of Baruch Spinoza? Cultured and audacious, refined and haughty, the marranos were bathed in an aura of enticing exoticism. That was how Rembrandt painted them and that is how Heine immortalized them in his poetry. The fact that some of them may have been Christians for a while did not damage this romantic portrayal. They were anusim, forced – that is, they had been subjected to a forced baptism, not to mention the tortures of the Inquisition. They had been tortured, derided, made to suffer. The Spanish disdainfully called them marranos. Precisely for this reason, they deserve to be counted among the long series of Jewish martyrs.
Hidden in clandestinity, the marranos had preserved Judaism in the intimacy of their hearts. They did so even as they outwardly embraced the faith imposed upon them, Christianity. They continued to observe Jewish rites in secret. Their identity held firm, intact and authentic. Once the Christian mask was taken off, they returned to being Jews. For a long time, this romantic, and romanticized, vision was the most widespread one. For evidence of this, one need only leaf through the popular book by Cecil Roth, which right from its first pages speaks of the marranos’ ‘rare heroism’, the ‘sheer dramatic appeal’ of those Jews who, beyond any mystification, ‘remained at heart as they had always been’. It is as if their existence could be divided into two parts, an external and an internal one, without the one having an impact on the other. But those who spread such a consoling idea have no qualms about reiterating an old condemnation – asking why the marranos did not sacrifice themselves. Why, that is, did they not choose to die for Kiddush Hashem, the sanctification of the Name, and not follow the noble example of the Jews of the Rhineland, who resolutely faced up to their impending martyrdom?
The answer is often sought in the ‘moral difference’ between the German and Spanish Jews. It is supposed that, after years of good living, the Spanish Jews had got used to the world around them – and were thus no longer able to react. The Sephardic Jews and the marranos are thus all lumped in together, all equally beaten over the head with an intransigent, moralizing condemnation. This accusation recalls the one implicit in the abject question that was directed at the European Jews after the experience of Nazism: ‘why did they go like lambs to the slaughter?’
