Sepharadim/conversos and premodern Global Hispanism

ABSTRACT

Sepharadim participated in the Hispanic vernacular culture of the Iberian Peninsula. Even in the time of al-Andalus many spoke Hispano-Romance, and their Hebrew literature belies a deep familiarity with, and love of, their native Hispano-Romance languages. However, since the early sixteenth century, the vast majority of Sepharadim have never lived in the Hispanic world. Sepharadim lived not in Spanish colonies defined by Spanish conquest, but in a network of Mediterranean Jewish communities defined by diasporic values and institutions. By contrast, conversos, those Sepharadim who converted to Catholicism, whether in Spain or later in Portugal, Italy or the New World, lived mostly in Spanish imperial lands, were officially Catholic and spoke normative Castilian. Their connections, both real and imagined, with Sephardic cultural practice put them at risk of social marginalization, incarceration, even death. Some were devout Catholics whose heritage and family history doomed them to these outcomes. Not surprisingly, many Spanish and Portugese conversos sought refuge in lands outside of Spanish control where they might live openly as Jews. This exodus (in the 1600s) from the lands formerly known as Sefarad by a generation of conversos trained in Spanish universities led to a parallel Sephardic community of conversos who re-embraced Judaism in Amsterdam and Italy. The Sephardic/converso cultural complex exceeds the boundaries of Spanish imperial geography, confuses Spanish, Portuguese, Catholic and Jewish subjectivities and defies traditional categories practiced in Hispanic studies; it is a unique example of the Global Hispanophone.

KEYWORDS:

• Conversos
• Sephardic
• ladino
• Judeo-Spanish
• Amsterdam

Notes on contributor

David Wacks is Head of the Department of Romance Languages and Professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon. He earned his PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California–Berkeley in 2003. In 2006 he was Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. He is author of Framing Iberia: Frametales and Maqamat in Medieval Spain (Brill, 2007), winner of the 2009 La Corónica award, and Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature: Jewish Cultural Production before and after 1492 (Indiana University Press, 2015), winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Sephardic Culture. He is also coeditor, with Michelle Hamilton, of The Study of al-Andalus: The Scholarship and Legacy of James T. Monroe (ILEX Foundation, 2018). His most recent monograph, Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World, is forthcoming in 2019 from University of Toronto Press. He blogs on his current research at http://davidwacks.uoregon.edu. Email: [email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In this essay Sepharadim refers to Jews living in, or originating in, the Iberian Peninsula. Conversos (literally “the converted”) refers to Sepharadim who have converted to Catholicism (regardless of the circumstances), and their descendants.

2 In a series of works written at the beginning of the twentieth century, Pulido argued for restoration of Moroccan and Balkan Sepharadim as Spanish citizens and colonial administrators (Pulido 1904, [1905] 1993, 2006; Bel Bravo 1993; Alpert 2005). Giménez Caballero, who in 1931 made a short documentary on Sephardic Jews in the eastern Mediterranean titled Los judíos de patria española, followed Pulido’s line, combining it with protofascist ideals (Friedman 2011).

3 The name Sefarad is from Ovadiah 1:20: “The captives of Jerusalem, that are in Sefarad, shall possess the cities of the South”. While the location is historically uncertain (though it may refer to Lyria in Asia Minor), in Jewish tradition, Sefarad has been associated with the Iberian Peninsula since the Roman period (Gerber 1992, x).

4 For an overview of Sephardic/converso history, see Gerber (1992), Díaz Mas (1992), Benbassa and Rodrigue (2000), Roth (2002) and Zohar (2005).

5 See Díaz Mas (1992, 72–73) and Attig (2012). While the philosephardic discourse of Ángel Pulido emphasizes the timelessness and perfectly preserved Castilian of (at least the Moroccan) Sepharadim, the reality, as described by scholars of Sephardic tradition, such as Samuel Armistead and Joseph Silverman, is more complex. Sephardic Spanish was not in fact a time capsule, either linguistically or culturally; while it is true that the various dialects conserved features that later became obsolete in Peninsular speech communities, it also continued to evolve in its contact with South Slavic, Turkish, Arabic, French and other languages. See Armistead and Silverman (1982) and Díaz Mas (1992, 78).

6 Seventeenth-century Sephardic author Imanuel Aboab relates the famous yet unlikely apocryphal anecdote (2007, 304–305).

7 Gonzalo Correas records this saying, in a slightly different form, in his 1627 Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales, as “O somos gallegos o no nos entendemos (“Either we are Galicians [who are dull witted] or we are not understanding one another”) (1967, 165). My guess is that the Sephardic communities adapted the version recorded by Gonzalo Correas to mock the non-Castilian speech of the Galician members of their communities.

8 In a 1964 remarks to the Sephardic community of Tétouan, Spanish Hebraist Federico Pérez Castro claimed that the greatest evidence of Sephardic hispanidad was their cultural tendency toward imperialism, their having imposed (impusieron) Spanish culture on the communities where they settled:

Tan profundamente calaron en el alma de nuestros judíos las raíces de lo español, que los hispano-hebreos, al salir de España, si bien físicamente la dejaron atrás, se la llevaron consigo dentro de sus corazones, y en lejanas tierras, no sólo siguieron viviendo según nuestros modos, sino que los impusieron allí donde fueron a establecerse; fenómeno espiritual y social éste tan perfectamente español, que acaso sea el que más netamente defina su honda indentificación [sic] con España (Pérez Castro 1964, 83–84; Wacks 2015, 192)

9 For an overview of Sephardic folklore, see Díaz Mas (1992, 112–132) and Bunis (1992, 63–66). For studies of oral traditions see, for example, Armistead and Silverman (1971, 1982), Koén-Sarano (1994, 1986, 1999) and Alexander (2008). On its decadence, see Harris (1994).

10 On the formation of these communities, especially their religious and cultural life, see Ray (2013).

11 On the effect of the Inquisition on the literature of early modern Spain, see Gitlitz (2002) and Fontes (2005).

12 In 2004 I attended religious study session in Seattle in which participants complained of the sixteenth-century Ladino translation of one of the Prophets: “I can’t understand this stuff! My grandparents didn’t talk like that!” The spoken language of their elders was a far cry from the Cervantine Spanish of the Biblical text, much like the English of the King James Bible to a speaker of contemporary US English.