Voyaging Into Jewish History

 

Previously, I explored Haredi education through an Abie Rotenberg song. I would like to continue to use Abie Rotenberg to better understand Jewish thought. The song "Journey at Sea" from the album Journeys Five stands as a useful introduction to a traditional view of Jewish History. To be clear, by history here, what I mean is not so much the particular facts about the past but the narrative framework in which we place those facts. Admittedly, part of the song's charm is that it never explicitly says anything about Judaism. If I had heard this song on a Celtic album I would have simply thought that this was a solid song. What follows is my interpretation. You have the ship of Judaism crewed by the faithful and led by wise captain rabbis. It sails on the Sea of Galus (exile). The goal is at some point to reach the port of messianic redemption, but that is of little day-to-day relevance when compared to living as a religious Jew. The challenge of sailing on the Sea of Galus is that inevitably you are going to run into storms that threaten to destroy Judaism either through physical violence or through assimilation. 

It should be noted that the captain and the crew are fundamentally passive figures as events play themselves out. They have absorbed enough of Jewish History to recognize that storms are on the horizon and take measures, presumably the strengthening of Jewish practice, to give themselves a chance of getting through the storm with the ship intact. That being said, no one on the ship ever tries to stop storms from happening. Such actions are presumed to be beyond their power and, therefore foolhardy to pursue. All that is left is to recognize that they have limited power and seek to act only within their means. 

This view of Jewish History has not been limited to Orthodox writers. For example, Heinrich Graetz's Jewish History is famously an exercise in a lachrymose narrative in which Jews suffer and think. There is a reason why Rabbi Berel Wein was able to so easily take Graetz and give him a more religious spin. Graetz's basic narrative remained a fundamentally traditional one in which Judaism managed to survive outside threats even as, for Graetz, Judaism meant something slightly different from Orthodox writers, mainly nothing involving Kabbalah or Hasidism.    

An essential point to understand about political Zionism (whether secular or religious) is that it rejected our traditional model of Jewish History. One thinks of the example of Benzion Netanyahu's biography of Isaac Abarbanel. Netanyahu could never forgive Abarbanel for having been caught by surprise by 1492 and for having no real solution to the problem of expulsion beyond apocalypticism. If Jews had a state of their own, then Jews would not have had to ask themselves the question of what are they to do if they were faced with expulsion or pogroms as Jews living in a Jewish State would not be under the power of gentiles. Similarly, at a spiritual level, Jews would not have had to worry about making themselves acceptable to gentiles and refashioning Judaism to suit gentile tastes. Instead, Jews could have focused on the development of a genuinely Jewish culture. From this perspective, traditional Jewish History, with its emphasis on bracing to be hit in the hope of being able to stand back up again, was a colossal mistake that needed to be fixed.     

It should be appreciated that the State of Israel was founded in 1948 at a time when the traditional model of Jewish History seemed to have reached a dead end. This was in the wake of the Holocaust when a modern state like Germany decided to invest its full efforts in murdering all Jews under its control. Furthermore, neither the United States and certainly not the Soviet Union could stand as plausible candidates for flourishing Jewish life, particularly when being Jewish now meant facing the possibility of something like the Holocaust. Under such circumstances, it seemed unlikely that Judaism could survive without a Jewish State that would physically protect Jews and offer them a space to be productive citizens without abandoning their Jewish identity. In judging the State of Israel over the past seventy-five years, it is a fair question to consider to what extent it has offered a legitimate alternative to traditional Jewish History.

In understanding the traditional narrative of Jewish History, it is useful to also pay attention to the song's chorus: "It's our life a journey at sea, a voyage of fate and destiny." What has allowed Jews to even try to survive as Jews has been a belief that there really was no other way of life available to them. To be a religious Jew has meant believing that God has a literal plan for history that requires Jewish survival so he will not allow the Jewish people to disappear. If you are a Jew, you will always be a Jew and God, often acting through gentiles, will never allow you to escape your Judaism no matter how hard you try. Even for those Jews who formally reject such theology, the basic model of seeing the world can be hard to shake.   

 

How Many Jewish Historians Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb?

How many Jewish Historians does it take to change a light bulb (or even to insert one in the first place)? Well, as with everything in Judaism, it is subject to a Talmudic style debate.


Heinrich Graetz: As the light bulb both suffers, by having an electric current pumped through it, and thinks, by lighting up, it is without question a uniquely Jewish symbol and should be placed within our Jewish Studies department where it will stand as a mark of Judaism's intrinsic rationality in contrast to the superstition and intolerance of Christians, who for some reason get the majority of the light bulbs. Since our kind civilized German gentile neighbors are unlikely to give us many light bulbs they will have to be rationed out. Historians of Kabbalah and Hasidism will not be receiving light bulbs in the hope that everyone will forget that they even exist, allowing the rest of us to avoid embarrassment at inter-departmental meetings.

Salo W. Baron: I object to this lachrymose narrative. Light bulbs have always been an intrinsic part of their surrounding socio-economic structures. And if you object to the lack of suffering being inflicted on light bulbs I will make you read my eighteen volume social and religious history of light bulbs.

Jacob Katz: I second Baron. To show how Jews and gentiles might peacefully interact let us bring in one of the Hispanic workers to symbolize the shabbos goy and insert the light bulb in our department.

Gershom Scholem: Graetz how dare you associate light bulbs with Jewish rationalism when it is clear that light bulbs really symbolize the light of Ein Sof and the spiritual anarchism of Kabbalah in its struggle against the rigid legalism of the rabbis. Having fled Germany just in time to not get slaughtered by your civilized gentile neighbors, I no longer care if they think we are rational civilized people so I will vote to hand out light bulbs not only to kabbalists and hasidim, but also give Sabbatai Sevi and Jacob Frank chairs with tenure.

Yitzchak Baer: As another German who fled just in time, I second Scholem. Graetz, your rational light bulbs cannot be considered truly Jewish. They are really members of an Averroist sect only pretending to shine for our department. The moment the budget cuts come in, these light bulbs will gladly agree to shine for the Christian theology department rather than be burned at the garbage dump. Of course, if the light bulbs agree to be tortured by the Spanish Inquisition that will prove that they are part of the greater Jewish light bulbhood.

Leo Strauss: My dear Baer, this secret Averroism of light bulbs is part of what makes them so intrinsically Jewish just like Maimonides. Of course light bulbs shine with both an exoteric and a secret esoteric light. I look forward to studying under these new light bulbs so they can shine all sorts of esoteric messages onto the texts I am reading, messages that the masses (you fellow members of the department) could never hope to understand.

Benzion Netanyahu: Baer, those traitorous assimilationist light bulbs; even if they were to be tortured by the Spanish Inquisition it would not make them Jewish. Clearly, this is all a conspiracy hatched by racial anti-Semites from the medieval department, who are lying about how these light bulbs are still Jewish in order to get fresh light bulbs untainted by use in a Jewish Studies department. We can only applaud the gentiles for destroying assimilationist light bulbs. This will serve as a sign to all Jewish light bulbs to go to Israel. That is unless they find it too socialist, at which point they are free to seek employment in a Jewish Studies department in the States, as long as they promise to raise English speaking future Israeli right-wing prime ministers.


This post was inspired by a piece that was circulated through my department listserve, written by David Leeson at Laurentian University.

Q: How many historians does it take to change a light bulb?



A: There is a great deal of debate on this issue. Up until the mid-20th century, the accepted answer was ‘one’: and this Whiggish narrative underpinned a number of works that celebrated electrification and the march of progress in light-bulb changing. Beginning in the 1960s, however, social historians increasingly rejected the ‘Great Man’ school and produced revisionist narratives that stressed the contributions of research assistants and custodial staff. This new consensus was challenged, in turn, by women’s historians, who criticized the social interpretation for marginalizing women, and who argued that light bulbs are actually changed by department secretaries. Since the 1980s, however, postmodernist scholars have deconstructed what they characterize as a repressive hegemonic discourse of light-bulb changing, with its implicit binary opposition between ‘light’ and ‘darkness,’ and its phallogocentric privileging of the bulb over the socket, which they see as colonialist, sexist, and racist. Finally, a new generation of neo-conservative historians have concluded that the light never needed changing in the first place, and have praised political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for bringing back the old bulb. Clearly, much additional research remains to be done.



Matthew Lavine at Mississippi State responded:



Dear Dr. Leeson,


We regret that we cannot accept your historian joke in its present form.... However, a panel of anonymous reviewers (well, anonymous to YOU, anyway) have reviewed it and made dozens of mutually contradictory suggestions for its... improvement. Please consider them carefully, except for the ones made by a man we all consider to be a dangerous crackpot but who is the only one who actually returns comments in a timely fashion.

1. This joke is unnecessarily narrow. Why not consider other sources of light? The sun lights department offices; so too do lights that aren't bulbs (e.g. fluorescents). These are rarely "changed" and never by historians. Consider moving beyond your internalist approach.

2. The joke is funny, but fails to demonstrate familiarity with the most important works on the topic. I would go so far as to say that Leeson's omission is either an unprofessional snub, or reveals troubling lacunae in his basic knowledge of the field. The works in question are Brown (1988), Brown (1992), Brown (1994a), Brown (1994b), Brown and Smith (1999), Brown (2001), Brown et al (2003), and Brown (2006).

3. Inestimably excellent and scarcely in need of revision. I have only two minor suggestions: instead of a joke, make it a haiku, and instead of light bulbs, make the subject daffodils.

4. This is a promising start, but the joke fails to address important aspects of the topic, like (a) the standard Whig answer of "one," current through the 1950s; (b) the rejection of this "Great Man" approach by the subsequent generation of social historians; (c) the approach favored by women's historians; (d) postmodernism's critique of the light bulb as discursive object which obscured the contributions of subaltern actors, and (e) the neoconservative reaction to the above. When these are included, the joke should work, but it's unacceptable in its present form.


5. I cannot find any serious fault with this joke. Leeson is fully qualified to make it, and has done so carefully and thoroughly. The joke is funny and of comparable quality to jokes found in peer journals. I score it 3/10 and recommend rejection.

I Score a Footnote

Dr. Adam S. Ferziger is one of the leading minds in understanding Orthodox Jewry, both in the historical nineteenth century setting and in the modern context. He is the author of Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance, and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity, which deals with the creation of Orthodox Judaism in nineteenth century Germany in terms of its understanding of the dominant Reform movement. I actually met him once a few years ago when he spoke about breakaway synagogue in early eighteenth century London that was set up because the established synagogue was allowing Sabbath breakers to come up to the Torah. Ferziger points to this as an example of "proto-Orthodoxy." I ended up asking him about the converso background of this community which led into a discussion of Benzion Netanyahu and the debate over the Jewishness of conversos.

A few days ago I was reading his essay, "From Demonic Deviant to Drowning Brother: Reform Judaism in the Eyes of American Orthodoxy," (Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 15.3 (2009): pg. 56-88) which deals with the back and forth in recent decades within the Haredi community as to how to deal with Reform Jews. Are Reform Jews heretics, who must be rejected and ignored or are they lost Jews who must be saved through outreach? The heart of the essay is a discussion of Rabbi Yaakov Perlow (the Novominsker Rebbe) and his letter to the Jewish Observer in 1999, which took a positive attitude toward recent Reform efforts to bring in more ritual practice into the movement.

This is a wonderful essay, well worth your reading just for itself. I would, though, like to call your attention to footnotes 129 and 132: "Cited in Benzion N. Chinn, 'Towards One People in One World,' The Commentator, Dec. 31, 2002, http://www.yucommentator.com/." This refers to a book review I did for the Yeshiva University student newspaper on Ammiel Hirsch and Yaakov Yosef Reinman's One People, Two Worlds: A Reform Rabbi and an Orthodox Rabbi Explore the Issues That Divide Them where I attacked the Haredi establishment for doing a more effective job at refuting Reinman's claims of Orthodox tolerance than the Reform ever could. If academic prowess is measured Technorati style in footnotes in respectable publications, this marks an excellent first step.

Benzion Netanyahu: Where the Middle Ages and the Middle East Collide

Erich Follath’s “Is war between Iran and Israel inevitable?” (Originally run in Der Speigel but translated for Salon) is a good example of liberal moral equivalency. Its essential premise, after hypocritically acknowledging that the two are not morally equivalent, is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are very much alike and the combination of the two of them makes it likely that a major conflict in the Middle East will erupt. Forget the fact that Israel recognizes Iran as a Shiite Muslim state and desires to have peace with it. Forget the fact that Netanyahu is a secular Jew with no apocalyptic pretentions. What caught my attention in this otherwise banal article was that it refers to my area of interest, medieval Jewish history. Follath mentions Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, the historian Benzion Netanyahu and his book, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain. (A few years ago, during Passover, I asked my father for a deluxe Spanish Inquisition action figure set as my way of requesting this book. Once you are finished reading it you can hit people over the head with it in the hope of doing serious bodily harm.) As Follath notes:

In his more than 1,300-page opus, the key points of which he conveyed to his sons in hours of family readings, the historian argues that the Spaniards were more strongly motivated by racism than religion in their pogroms against the Jews during the Inquisition. He also argues that militant anti-Semitism is always an expression of unmotivated hatred, and that there is only one possible response to it: militant and, if necessary, preventive Jewish self-defense.

I am not sure what Follath’s background in Jewish history is or if he actually bothered to read Benzion Netanyahu for himself, but pogrom violence is certainly very different than Inquisition violence. A basic point of the senior Netanyahu’s is that the Spanish Inquisition only came about in the years after the major anti-converso riots. This is important because Netanyahu wants to argue that the Inquisition only came about after Judaizing conversos had stopped being a real issue and therefore the real purpose of the Inquisition could only have been to eliminate Christians of Jewish descent.

I am not a fan of Benzion Netanyahu’s work precisely because it speaks too much to a modern historical agenda. In Netanyahu’s case, as a man nearing his 100th birthday, this “modern” agenda is the failure of pre-war secular Jewry, particularly in Germany, to forestall the threat of Nazism, a brand of anti-Semitism that had nothing to do with religion. When discussing Benzion Netanyahu with other people I often find myself walking the exact opposite path as Follath. Benzion Netanyahu happens to be the father of a certain right wing Israeli politician of the same name, which is a good indicator of his politics. This is a right wing secular Zionist, who left Israel and became a history professor at Cornell because Israel was being run by a bunch of leftists.

Follath simply shoehorns Netanyahu into the needs of his article. Another useful of thinking of the senior Netanyahu’s politics as it plays out in his history books is that Jews should not put their trust in gentiles like Follath, however well meaning they might be, in the hope that they will protect them from the likes of those like Ahmadinejad, who wish to kill Jews simply because they are Jews.

Toward a Narrative of Anti-Semitism

Recently I have been engaging in a private e-mail conversation with a person, who wishes to remain anonymous, as to the history of anti-Semitism. This conversation came out of a comment I made a few months ago when posted on Yaacov Deutsch and his presentation at the AJS. I take a fairly traditional position in terms of anti-Semitism, dividing anti Semitism between the medieval model and the modern model. My friend wishes to view early modern anti-Semitism as part of its own category, noting, in particular, the increase in Christian literature on Jews and an awareness of Jews as an ethnic group. While my friend does not wish to be named, he has agreed to allow me to post the relevant parts of our conversation.

Nicholas Donin and the medieval examples that are parallel to him are marginal in comparison to the number of early modern works that reveal anti-Christian hostility.
Anonymous

As to the issue of Christian attitudes toward Jews in the early modern period. I acknowledge that there is a lot more literature at this time. Also that there is a lot more about Jewish life. That being said I still see the major downturn in Jewish-Christian relations as happening during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For example, we have Nicholas Donin pointing out that present-day Jews are not simply some museum piece preserved from Biblical times. Our converted Jews in the sixteenth century are pushing a more sophisticated version of this thesis. If I understood you correctly you want to argue that the big shift happens in the early modern period. I am open to being convinced of the matter, but for the moment I am still sticking to the standard view. Why this shift happens and what it consists of is, of course, a hotly debated matter between R. I. Moore, Jeremy Cohen, and Robert Chazan.
Benzion

As for the change in the early modern period, I am not arguing that there was no change in the twelfth or thirteenth century, but that the early modern period marks another change. I would see it as a shift from writing about Judaism to writing about Jews and from writing about theology to writing about ethnicity. Prior to the sixteenth century there is almost no interest in the way Jews actually live. There are almost no descriptions of their rituals, almost nothing about their anti-Christian rituals and relatively little about their anti-Christian texts. This is the shift I am pointing to.
Anonymous

In terms of our understanding of anti-Semitism, I suspect that this is more a matter of what we would emphasis as opposed to a genuine disagreement. If I were to craft a narrative of anti-Semitism, for a course or for a book, I would hang it around the two poles of medieval anti-Judaism, with its origins in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and modern anti-Semitism, with its origins in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and culminating in the Holocaust. So you have medieval anti-Judaism with its belief that Jews were usurious Christ-killers who murdered Christian children for their blood and tortured hosts and you have modern anti-Semitism where Jews are a race of degenerates plotting to take over the world through the simultaneous uses of both Capitalism and Communism. For this, I would emphasis Gavin Langmuir's notion of chimerical anti-Semitism. We are not interested in other groups simply not liking Jews and saying nasty things. How do Jews go from being heretics and blasphemers to sorcerers plotting with Satan to take over the world? Our opening would cover anti-Judaism in the ancient world and the early Church with our big question being how do we get to medieval anti-Judaism. The first big part of the book would deal with medieval anti Judaism. Once we have explored medieval anti-Judaism our next big issue would be modern anti-Semitism. The sixteenth-century is useful in that it serves as a transition were, out of the issues generated by medieval anti-Judaism we begin to get issues of ethnicity. For example, the blood laws in fifteenth-century Spain, which Benzion Netanyahu makes such a big deal out of, or the works on Jewish practices written by converted Jews in Germany. From here we move to modern anti-Semitism, where race issues supplant religion, culminating in the Holocaust. Then we would finish with a word about anti-Semitism in the world today, particularly opposition to the state of Israel in the Arab world and on the hard left. You would make the early modern period equal or even more important than the twelfth and nineteenth centuries. I agree that there are interesting things going on in the period and that anti-Judaism is not something static as Trachtenberg portrayed it. I agree that a lot of what we associate with modern anti-Semitism comes into play in the early modern period. That being said I would still see the early modern period as a mutated version of medieval anti-Judaism that eventually turns into modern anti-Semitism. I freely admit that this may have to do more with my taste in narrative than hard fact. My challenge to you would be what does my narrative fail to take into account that your narrative does.
Benzion

Regarding your outline for a narrative of anti-Semitism and the two poles you suggest. I don’t disagree that if you have to chose only two, or even to focus on the two major poles, the 12-13 century attitudes toward Jews and the modern anti Semitism would be the two poles that should be chosen. However I feel that without underlying the changes in the early modern period our understanding of modern anti Semitism is not complete. I think that the early modern period should not be seen only as a transitional period, but also as a time when important changes in Christian attitude toward Jews occurred, and without them it is hard to understand modern anti Semitism. As I said I agree with you that if we to choose only two poles they would be 12-13 century attitudes toward Jews and the modern anti Semitism, but since I don’t think we need to choose only two I think that the early modern period should get more attention when studying anti Semitism. It seems to me that the main difference between the book you suggest and the one I would suggest would be the room given to the early modern period which in my opinion should be greater than what I believe you would suggest. Another difference is the emphasis on changes that appear in the early modern period in my account as oppose to your view, that as I understand it, will focus on the early modern period as a transition period while underlying the continuation of the medieval approaches. I don’t think that the two narratives are in real disagreement rather they reflect different ideas about the importance of the early modern period and differences regarding the emphasis the early modern period should get.
Anonymous

General Exam III: Jewish History (Part III)

What are some of the major historiographical debates concerning the conversos of the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries? Who are the historians who have participated in these debates? Explain which side you take in each debate and why.

The year 1391 saw a wave of anti-Jewish riots engulf the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. This was followed by an intensive and well organized missionary campaign, with apostate Jews such as Paul of Burgos and Joshua Halorki playing prominent roles. The highlight of this missionary campaign was a public disputation at Tortosa, hosted by the Avignon Pope, Benedict XIII. These events utterly demoralized the Jewish community. It is believed that over the course of these two decades upwards of one third of the Jewish community converted to Christianity, creating a new social group in Spain, the conversos or New Christians.

The Christian populace viewed these New Christians with suspicion and as being, in a sense, a greater threat then Jews. Medieval society possessed an elaborate system designed to keep Jews in their place. Conversos, though, as Christians did not live under the traditional strictures that bound Jews. By converting to Christianity, these conversos now could take up high government positions, marry into noble families and even to enter the Church and become priests. In response to this problem, Old Christians developed, over the course of the fifteenth century, a series of mechanisms to keep conversos down, such as a theory of racial identity and purity of blood (limpieza de sangre). This can be seen most clearly in a series of ordinances passed in the city of Toledo in 1449. These ordinances placed restrictions on all those descended from converted Jews and banned them from holding certain offices. Furthermore opponents of conversos accused them of being crypto-Jews or marranos. These accusations culminated in the creation of the Spanish Inquisition, whose purpose was to root out those who practiced “Judaizing” heresies.

In 1492, the monarchs of Castile and Aragon, Isabella and Ferdinand, attempted to solve the converso problem by simply expelling all Jews from their dominions. The thought was that the continued presence of a Jewish community served as a negative influence on the conversos; remove the negative influence and the conversos would submerge into the general Christian society. Clearly a reasonable assumption, the problem, though, was that since they offered Jews a choice to convert instead of leaving and even went so far as to allow those Jews who left the chance to come back, embrace Catholicism and regain their property. (An offer that many Jews took the Crown up on.) This created a whole new round of conversos, thus putting everything back to square one. The Spanish Crown had to use the Inquisition to root out Judaizers, a process that would color the Spanish cultural landscape for centuries.

A similar situation, though, as we shall see later, with important differences, played itself out in Portugal. Many of the Jews who fled Spain in 1492 went to Portugal. In 1497 King Manuel forcibly baptized them, thus creating a new converso community. After a few decades Portugal found itself in the same situation as Spain; it had this large population of former Jews and their descendents with serious questions hanging over their doxy. To solve this problem Portugal followed the Spanish lead and instituted an Inquisition of its own to root out Judaizers. And as with Spain, this process went on for centuries.

Throughout the following centuries conversos continued to leave Spain and particularly Portugal. In fact Portuguese became a byword for converso amongst Europeans. Many of these conversos joined established Jewish communities in Italy and the Ottoman Empire. Others went to places such as France and England where, even though Jews were banned, there was no Inquisition and so as long as one did not do anything too obvious one could live in safety. Finally there were conversos who established their own Jewish communities. The most prominent of these was the Amsterdam community in Holland. Thus making themselves, once again a factor in the Jewish world.

The Jewish community in dealing with these conversos was, ironically enough, faced with the exact same problem as the Spanish Inquisition; were these conversos Jews or were they Christians? Just as there was a first act for Spain, when they had to deal with conversos alongside a Jewish community in the fifteenth century, and a second act, when they had they had to deal with conversos without a Jewish community in a post 1492 Spain, so to there are two acts in the story of how the Jewish community dealt with conversos, the fifteenth century and post 1492. Each of these two phases has to be treated separately.

The problem of the conversos has been passed down to modern academic scholarship, which has struggled where to fit conversos and to answer the basic question of to what extent were the charges against conversos true; was there at any point a significant population of conversos secretly practicing Judaism. The two major figures in this debate are Yitzchak Baer, who assumed that the conversos were, by and large practicing Jews, and Benzion Netanyahu, who argues that this was all a myth creating by their Old Christian opponents.[1]

Yitzchak Baer relied on Inquisition material and was willing to lend credence to it. For Baer, obviously, the Inquisition’s charges were hardly negative. Baer embraces the conversos. The conversos were secret Jews and as such they are part of the Jewish people and of the Jewish destiny. The funny thing about Baer is that he believed that that the Jews who converted in the aftermath of 1391 were Averroists, who did not really believe in Judaism. Once they became Christians they continued to practice their Averroist Judaism. So the Church found themselves dealing with a group of heretical Christians made up of what had once been heretical Jews.
Benzion Netanyahu, first in The Marranos of Spain and later in The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, advances the revisionist claim that the conversos, were by and large, believing Christians not any different from Old Christians. Ironically enough, Netanyahu basis this undermining of a Jewish legend completely on Jewish sources. Netanyahu’s argument is that, unlike the Inquisition sources which treat conversos as Judaizers, rabbinic sources particularly once we get past the events of 1391 are almost unanimous in their negative attitude toward conversos, viewing them as Christian apostates. In fact Jews cheered the creation of the Inquisition and willingly cooperated with them, even to the point of making up charges against conversos.

An example of a case that Netanyahu puts a lot of emphasis on is that of Profiat Duran and his friend. Both Duran and the friend converted under duress during the violence of 1391. They planned to travel to the Holy Land to do penance. Later, though, the friend reneged on these plans; even though he had originally converted under duress, he had since come to sincerely believe in Christianity. Duran devotes his satirical polemic, Do Not be Like Your Forefathers, to mocking this former friend of his. Netanyahu loves this story because it illustrates how even the original generation of conversos were hardly the loyal defenders of Judaism that myth would have it.

This begs the question, why the Inquisition; if there were no Judaizing conversos, particularly once we get past the early fifteenth century, why was the Spanish Inquisition formed? Netanyahu devotes Origins of the Inquisition to answering this question. For Netanyahu the Spanish Inquisition was the product of a decades long racial campaign by Old Christians to eliminate the conversos. The claim that conversos were secretly practicing Judaism was a lie made up in order to justify murdering off conversos and maintaining the racial purity of Spain. What is really radical about this theory is that Netanyahu has effectively rewritten fifteenth century Christian anti-Judaism as very modern sounding anti Semitism. Netanyahu’s fifteenth century Spain is almost identical to early twentieth century Germany. You have a large population of highly assimilated Jews who want nothing more than to leave their heritage behind and be accepted by the general populace. They are stopped, though, by a racial anti Semitism, that sees them as a threat not because of their Jewish beliefs, they have none to speak of, but because of their racial heritage.

Netanyahu’s views remain controversial. His main supporter is Norman Roth whose Conversos, Inquisition the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain is a history of fifteenth century conversos, consciously told outside the context of Judaism. Roth’s conversos are Christians and part of Christian society. Outside the field of Jewish history, Netanyahu has gained the gained the support of Henry Kamen, one of the leading scholars on early modern Spain. Kamen’s discussion of the Jewish situation in his book, The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision, comes straight out of Netanyahu.

Netanyahu has gained quite a number of opponents, particularly Gershon Cohen and Yosef Yerushalmi. Cohen attacked Netanyahu’s use of rabbinic sources. For example he argued that rabbis were inclined to treat conversos as gentiles simply as a matter of halachic convenience. Saying that conversos were gentiles solves a number of problems, particularly those relating to marriage and divorce. For example if a converso women were to abandon her converso husband without a divorce, and declare herself to be a Jew she could still be allowed to remarry despite never getting a divorce; since she was not living as a Jew her original marriage was never valid in the first place.

Yerushalmi, in From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth- Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics, does not directly come out in defense of the conversos Jewishness. What he is particularly interested in, though, is taking the Portuguese conversos out of Netanyahu’s model. These Jews were forcibly converted and were never given any sort of choice. Moreover these Jews had already fled Spain, abandoning their homes and possessions. Also, even after their conversion, they managed to go nearly forty years without having to deal with an inquisition.[2] This allowed them to build some sort of Jewish community. It is not a coincidence that almost all of the conversos leaving Iberia and joining the Jewish community were Portuguese. For example the main subject of Yerushalmi’s book, Isaac Cardoso, and his brother, Abraham Cardoso were of Portuguese descent.

I believe that it is important to transcend the issue of whether conversos were really Jews or Christians. I agree with Netanyahu that while many of the original conversos converted to Christianity out of fear and continued to practice Judaism secretly either in their hearts or in actual practice, the later generations of conversos were distanced from the Jewish community and therefore cannot be viewed as part of it. The Jewish community did not recognize them as Jews and so therefore it would not be appropriate to talk about secret Jews. That being said I am not about to pass on the Inquisition and assume that it was simply the product of a racist conspiracy. I assume that many if not most of the people who went through the Inquisition were not good Catholics and were guilty of something. Considering that the vast majority of the people that the Spanish Inquisition focused its attention on were descended from Jews it only makes sense that there would be a Jewish influence at work and the heresy involved would have a certain Judaic flavoring to it. Of course bad Catholic does not mean good Jew or even a Jew at all. Just as bad Jew does not mean good Catholic. The problem with having rabbinic sources face off against Inquisition sources is that they are talking at cross purposes with each other and mean very different things by Jew and Christian.

The fact that you had Christians with Judaic practices or even heterodox Catholics raises an interesting question as to why this was even important. Christianity has a long history of tolerating the native practices of recently converted people and it has even been willing to wink at their heterodoxies. (What are Easter and Christmas but pagan practices that were brought into Christianity by converts?) A useful parallel is the situation in the New World. Beyond getting natives to commit to the act of baptism there was little done to eliminate their traditional pagan practices and beliefs. Native Americans were specifically exempted from the Inquisition. Even today much of the Catholicism practiced in South America is a syncretist Catholicism far removed from Orthodox Catholicism. So the question is if the Spanish and Portuguese were so willing to turn the other way and ignore the native keeping an idol in his hut why did they care if a converso lit candles in his house Friday night, taught his children Hebrew phrases or believed in the continued relevance of Mosaic Law? Just the Church tolerated the development of a syncretist Catholicism amongst Native Americans it could have fairly easily tolerated a Judaic syncretist Catholicism among Spanish Catholics of Jewish descent. Of course Muslims were in the same situation so it cannot simply be a matter of anti-Semitism.

[1] Before I continue there is something I should make very clear. There is a long heroic mythology about conversos describing them as striving to maintain their Judaism under extreme situations. This myth is exemplified in Marcus Lehmann’s novel Family y Arguilar, written during the nineteenth century. Family y Arguilar features a family of conversos secretly leading a full blown traditionally Jewish lifestyle with an underground Jewish community in seventeenth century Spain. As far as everyone is concerned these sorts of conversos are a myth. No one is trying to claim that such people actually existed.
[2] The conversos did undergo a major attack in Lisbon in 1506. This is the subject of another book by Yerushalmi.

(To be continued ...)