Donatella Di Cesare
MARRANOS: THE OTHER OF THE OTHER
Boston: Politybooks, 2020, ISBN: 978-1-509-54204-8
Reviewed by Ignat Ayzenberg*
The word “Marrano” is an adjectival noun. The etymology is unclear, but posterity settled on the meaning of “pig.” In early modern Spain, this epithet referred to the New Christians (or conversos) with the intention of a kind of racial jest or slur as the assimilated progeny had been also suspected of the “Judaizing heresy.” The suspicion of connivance was compelling enough to warrant an official policy of segregation toward the conversos in the capital of Toledo even before the Crown chivalrously decided to offer its Jewry the cross or the boot in 1492. This policy was subsequently replicated in other parts of Spain and Portugal, and their colonies overseas, when the Catholic Inquisition felt it was necessary.
We now come to a very curious turn of events. After the extirpation of Judaism from all public life on the Iberian Peninsula, the conversos were still suspected of apostasy for centuries. Many were imprisoned, tortured, mutilated, or burned alive for religious inspiration. They were not, however, always or entirely prevented from considerable social mobility, even intermarrying with the nobility and assuming positions of wealth and power in Spanish-Portuguese society. In other words, the conversos were not collectively absorbed, evicted, or eradicated by other means, as was the natural order of things. They perpetuated precisely as what we today would call a “discriminated minority” within the gray area of individual acceptance and collective rejection, individual assimilation and collective exclusion, individual belonging and collective non-belonging.
The combined effect of the discriminatory state policy and persistent religious persecution made the continuation of Jewish identity only possible on the individual level, which may or may not point to a unique experience of individuality in the Marrano example. In Marranos: The Other of the Other, Donatella Di Cesare, a professor of theoretical philosophy at Sapienza University in Rome, argues that the Marrano experience is an early form of an essentially modern experience of individuation. It is an individual’s ongoing reconstruction of personal identity or the subject Self in identifying with a multiplicity of identities, while not identifying with one or another collective. In fact, for Di Cesare the Marrano experience introduced the very modern concept of the right to privacy.
The crux of the problem is that Di Cesare addresses but dismisses a historical interpretation by positing a phenomenological one. Aside from the largely uncorroborated trove of official documentation of the Catholic Inquisition, the material evidence for the existence of crypto-Judaism, the selective preservation of collective Jewish life by some conversos which buttressed the Christian suspicion of all conversos on the Iberian Peninsula is remarkably scarce. Again, some conversos were crypto-Jews, to be sure, but they hardly constituted an underground community or conspiracy to undermine Christendom from within. Very possibly, the “Judaizing” threat was substantially exaggerated by the secular-ecclesiastical authorities: first, for the money; second, to impose deeper conformity to an emerging state after the defeat of the last Muslim kingdom near Gibraltar; or, third, to champion the cause of Catholicism even as far away as the West Indies.
Ultimately, the simple fact that generations of conversos fled to Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Livorno, Venice, Ferrara, Salonika, and elsewhere renounced Christianity and formed distinctive ex-Marrano communities suggests they were already involved with some form of crypto-Judaism, no matter how distant in memory or immaterial in practice it may have been on the Iberian Peninsula. At the same time, if we are serious about the existing evidence, we cannot be sure about the existence of crypto-Judaism, since those who crossed the Pyrenees, sometimes routinely on business, did not necessarily embrace the same idea of who or what was a “Jew.” In fact, in one stark example, the Amsterdam ex-Marrano community required new arrivals to undergo an approbation period in order to acclimate themselves to the rabbinic norms.
Di Cesare brilliantly underscores and analyzes the limitations of our historical knowledge stemming from the empirical uncertainty involving crypto-Judaism in early modern Spain. But she confuses the absence of material culture for an opportunity to blaze a new path in Jewish history, perhaps in history as a field of study as we know it, as well. “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” (6). Later, Di Cesare explains: “Extraneousness, dissidence, the impossibility of being one’s own self – such were the distinctive traits of the marrano, who through her very existence heralded the modern condition. For her obligatory doubleness was the mirror that shattered the no less fragmented and divided identity of others” (32).
In other words, the duality of the Christian hostility and the simultaneous exclusion from Jewish society simply begs the comparison to the liminal figure of the emancipation era whose “Jewishness” presupposed an experience of the Self as “vague, obscure, elusive new alterity” (31), as Di Cesare put it. Spinoza is too often called “the first modern Jew” for this reason. Similarly, the astonishing proliferation of Kabbalah in Europe, Northern Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean, which presented a challenge to normative Judaism especially after the invention of the printing press, was driven by the concurrent tragic Marrano/ex-Marrano experience. The same may be said of historicism or the interpretation of the past based on the circumstances of the present, which started to appear after the catastrophe of 1492. One could say, in sum, philosophy, Kabbalah, and history continue to launch many a Jewish thinker on the path of dissent and reform.
Yet, Di Cesare is interested in more than merely Jewish history. The book is a post-modern critique of liberal modernity that uses the Marrano/ex-Marrano experience as a springboard. Individuality is the basis of free and open liberal society. It assumes the individual Self is a concrete being in need of protection, when, in fact, the Self is beside itself, not existing from itself, but from what is external to it, from the Other-than-itself. It is the degree to which this individual Self is tyrannized and possessed by the Other that makes personal identity seem concrete, material, tangible. Similarly, according to Di Cesare, the content of the Marrano’s well-guarded “secret” may have only been an abstract, fleeting, distant, fatuous idea of Judaism. She argues that it really does not matter. The fulfillment of Judaism was anyway indefinitely deferred to the more suitable, perhaps millenarian, future. What is relevant, however, according to Di Cesare, is the all-around confrontation of the Self and Other in the Marrano/ex-Marrano experience, in which truth, reality, or identity was neither objective nor subjective, but inter-subjective. The very act of passing down the “secret” to the next generation by creating decorum for privacy is most significant. The “Jewishness” existed in the transmission of the “secret,” not the “secret” itself. For the same reason, the “secret” had to be well-guarded even in the privacy of one’s home lest a child or a miscreant reveal it. “One can imagine the efforts that were made to continue a Jewish form of life in secret, maintaining a distinction between gestures, actions, and words” (33).
The slim, yet ponderous book of twenty-eight chapters in one hundred and nineteen pages reads more like an expressionistic, philosophical treatise or manifesto than an academic work on a historical subject. Others have pointed out that the Marrano experience foreshadowed aspects of Jewish modernity, such as racism, civil discrimination, ethnic cleansing, double consciousness, mass migration, the impact of alienation/individuation on traditional Judaism, or even the Christological myth of the International Jew. It is, indeed, the horrific impact of the Holocaust that makes us see the barbaric spectacle of the auto de fe in places like early modern Toledo, Valladolid, or Barcelona within the bellowing smoke of the crematoria in Auschwitz. Positing that the Marrano experience essentially transcends its own physical space and time by typifying the fundamental aspect of the modern human condition is quite another hypothesis that lacks persuasion even in so readable a book as this one. It deserves its own interpretative framework alongside nationalism, liberalism, acculturation, and globalization.
* Ignat (Shimshon) Ayzenberg has a PhD in history from Stanford University where he wrote on the Communist Zionists in Early Soviet Russia. He is now writing a brief study about the contribution of Chaim Chezekiah Medini, a Jerusalem-born Sephardic rabbi, toward the construction of the Jewish identity of the Krymchaks, a Jewish-Tatar community indigenous to Crimea in Late Imperial Russia. Pre-pandemic, Ignat was the Program Coordinator of Jewish Studies; he introduced the Minor in Jewish Studies, taught courses on Jewish history, Israel-Palestine, and Western Civilization, and organized public events and workshops.