Jewish by Candlelight - From Spanish Converso to Modern Mixed Marriage

Taking a look at today's Jewish-Christian families through the filter of the Spanish/Portuguese Jews forced to convert in the Inquisition. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews who were coerced into converting to Christianity in the 14th and 15th centuries faced a life of contradiction and duality.




Yovel also says that Christian society was pursuing a myth of homogeneity, trying to rid itself of what it perceived as "impure" and "foreign" elements. The irony is that the conversion of the Jews did not eliminate the "other," but rather brought it right into the heart of Christian society. The Conversos (Yovel explains in the preface that he uses the terms Marranos, Conversos and New Christians interchangeably) did not become "regular" Christians, nor were they regarded that way by Christian society. Rather, their life was marked by contradiction and duality.


The result, he says, was that most Marranos practiced a hybrid religion. "Judaizers" consciously tried to preserve elements of Judaism, often passed down through the women of the house who became quasi-rabbis, or gleaned, ironically, from lists of Jewish beliefs published by the Inquisition for informers. But while they may have lit Sabbath candles in secret, only pretended to eat the ubiquitous Iberian pork or mentally annulled their actions in church, theological confusion abounded. For example, Judaizers believed that Judaism was the true path "to salvation." The intent may have been Jewish, but the framing theology - salvation - was Catholic. Similarly, the Marranos had a patron saint: Queen Esther, herself a hidden Jew.

At the other end of the spectrum, Marranos who accepted their new Christian faith were still influenced by their Jewish background. The Inquisition records show Marranos who preferred to baptize their children on a Saturday, because of their "affection" for the day, and New Christian monks who, because they had a clinging distrust of the polytheistic or idolatrous beliefs these practices implied, rejected the Trinity and disdained the sacrament, without intending to return to Judaism.


So while the Marranos may all have been drawing on Judaism and Christianity, they were effectively practicing neither. Their identity, Yovel says, was far more fluid than recognized by subsequent historians. Meanwhile, their contemporaries felt increasingly resentful of this unprecedented and unstable "other within," and occasional bouts of violence against them erupted. Laws were enacted that prevented all Conversos from holding public office - shifting the source of their difference to blood from religion. This was a crucial shift in European thought, and one that preceded a similar shift in northern Europe by hundreds of years. The Nuremberg Laws were a result of a change in 19th century thought, but one independent of the Spanish example.

In 1480, almost a full century after the Marranos first became a social issue, the Inquisition was established to root out Judaizing Marranos (it had no jurisdiction over Jews). It also misunderstood the subtleties of the Conversos? identity, condemning as a secret Jew anyone showing any signs of a connection to Jewish tradition. (Thus, Arias - who, to all possible scrutiny, felt nothing more than nostalgia toward Judaism - was convicted of Judaizing in a posthumous trial that destroyed his son, a prominent bishop.)

In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella issued an edict expelling Spain's remaining Jews. The crucial argument against them, Yovel says, was that the Jews -? over whom the Inquisition had no jurisdiction - were perceived as a corrupting influence on the Marranos, teaching them how to Judaize.


Yovel, whose outstanding, multilayered work closely integrates philosophical issues with an historical narrative, sees split identities as "a basic structure of the human condition," but one that was legitimized only in the modern era. "In earlier times," he says, "split identities were considered illicit and illegal, a grave social and metaphysical sin punished by the Inquisition (and later, by nationalism and similar 'integralist' movements)." In this respect (as well as many others expanded upon by Yovel in the two final chapters), the Marranos were harbingers ? and perhaps, to some extent, catalysts - of modernity.


In "Double or Nothing?" a 2004 study of mixed-marriage families by Brandeis University professor Sylvia Barack Fishman, teenagers whose parents marked Christmas in some way generally saw themselves as heirs to two religions. In their minds, these religions co-existed as something essentially different from either mainstream Judaism or Christianity. Fishman goes on to describe an enormous, hybrid subculture of North American Judeo-Christian families, which differs "strikingly" from other American Jews of every denomination - just as the Marranos differed strikingly from their Jewish, and indeed Christian, contemporaries, sometimes even when they moved away from Spain and were able to practice Judaism in the open once again.

So as Diaspora communities continue to struggle with the increasingly urgent question of how to relate to the millions of Jews who marry "out," perhaps some perspective can be gained from Yovel's dualistic Marranos. Half a millennium on, they seem more relevant than ever.
