I am a Good Goy Now; I Believe in Yoshke, Pray to Getchkas and Eat Chazor Traif

Here is a poem by the converso Anton de Montoro (1404-77):


O sad, bitter clothes-peddler
Who does not feel your sorrow!
Here you are, sixty years of age,
And have always said (to the Virgin):
"You remained immaculate,"
And have never sworn (directly) by the Creator.
I recite the credo, I worship
Pots full of greasy pork,
I eat bacon half-cooked,
Listen to Mass, cross myself
While touching holy waters –
And never could I kill
These traces of the confeso (pejorative for Converso)

With my knees bent
And in great devotion
In days set for holiness
I pray, rosary in hand,
Reciting the beads of the Passion,
Adoring the God-and-Man
As my highest Lord,
And because of the remnants of my guilt
I cannot lose the name
Of an old Jewish son of a whore (puto).

(Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos - Split Identity and Emerging Modernity pg. 112)


So do we believe that this man was sincere in his profession of Catholicism; was he a secret Jew or just an all-round religious cynic?

Inquisition Cholent

"In the records of the Inquisition, adafina [cholent] was so popular a proof of secret Judaism that one gets the impression that the inquisitors like it even more than the Jews did; and because the clerics spelled out its ingredients for the record, one is thankful to the "Holy Office" for an occasional Jewish recipe." (Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos – Split Identity and Emerging Modernity pg. 130)

Now we know the true reason for the Spanish Inquisition. They tortured former Jews so that they would give up the secret Jewish recipe for cholent, allowing the inquisitors to make it for themselves. It would be a fun project to pull out some of these recipes from the archives and make an Inquisition cholent.

Articles of Interest (AJS, Georgia, Conversos, Brooks, Catholic Anglicans, Female Male Novelists)

I was not able to attend the recent AJS conference in Los Angeles. Thankfully Menachem Mendel and Drew Kaplan both posted on it. A pity we could not get something more extensive. This just goes to show that someone needs to fly me out to the next conference so I can blog on it properly.

My uncle, Rabbi Dovid Landesman, has Georgia on his mind over at Cross Currents as he talks about his recent trip to the Former Soviet Union and meeting Jews who have returned to Judaism after seventy years of Communism.

The Jews of the Former Soviet Union may be the modern day conversos, but Sandee Brawarsky gets to meet up with some modern old time conversos from Mallorca Spain, returning to Judaism after five hundred years.

For plain old converts to Judaism, Jennifer Medina writes in the New York Times about converts to Judaism and Christmas. The article features Aliza Hausman of Jewminicana, who criticizes the article for its mistakes.

David Brooks once again offers a principled conservative defense of the Obama administration, this time on their failure to foresee the recent attempted terrorist attack. To expect the government to be able to stop all terrorist attacks means that we have to invest more and more in expanding government programs. Conservatives who believe that government is imperfect, and should be limited, need to be careful what they say about this administration.

George Will discusses the recent offer by the Catholic Church to allow Anglicans to join while maintaining their particular traditions. Back in Elizabethan England you could still be Catholic as long as you did not attend a Catholic mass and recognized Queen Elizabeth I as the head of the Church of England. So now can you be an Anglican Catholic who holds on to the old traditions of believing that the Pope is the anti-Christ, trying to destroy the true English Church, the right to burn papist "spies" (Jesuits) and celebrate the Oxford martyrs?

Julianna Baggott advises women who wish to succeed as novelists to be men or at least write like them. Good thing I am a man writing about an eleven-year-old man with guns, blood, medieval surgery and Talmudic dialectics to boot.