Recent scholarship on Sephardic Jews and New Christians in the early modern Atlantic has drawn liberally on micronarratives to flesh out the experience of this marginal group. In his new book, Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic, Ronnie Perelis introduces a new dimension as he considers the role of emotion and the importance of literary works in our understanding of this world. Perelis focuses on various types of ties—consanguinity, family, and textual connections—in the works of three figures: Antonio de Montezinos (1604–47), Manuel Cardoso de Macedo (1585–1652), and Luis de Carvajal the Younger (1567–96), all three the authors of autobiographical works.
Drawing primarily on these autobiographical texts, Perelis reconstructs key moments of religious transition for each of the men, as he strives to understand why each of them sought out Judaism, even at the price of social and economic marginalization, or even death. Throughout, Perelis emphasizes—and expands—the role of family. In examining the role that family members played in conversion and Judaizing, he also goes beyond the nuclear family to treat distant relations and even imagined family as catalysts for religious transition.
The first of the book's five chapters presents Perelis's sources and methodology, and provides historical background for each of the main protagonists. Most importantly, Perelis guides the reader through the various modes and tropes of the literary construction of experience in early modern autobiographies, micro-narratives, and inquisitorial documents, and sets forth the ways these sources can be used for historical analysis. While autobiographies were deemed “unreliable” sources by earlier generations, Perelis argues that the early modern notion of autobiography must be separated from the modern, and rather than as a focus on the “I,” understood as “confrontations with the self,” a series of struggles that allow later historians to read “Carvajal, Cardoso, and Montezinos through the lens of family,” thereby exposing the centrality of familial and communal relations that frame the authors’ literary and psychological activity (21).
The second and third chapters deal with the spiritual awakening of Luis de Carvajal the Younger. Chapter 2 focuses on Carvajal's complicated relationship with his extended family of crypto-Jews and New Christians, some quite prominent. Carvajal's Vida was composed between two inquisitorial trials (the second resulting in his death at the stake on the charge of heresy), and was used as evidence against him and his family. Chapter 3 examines the central role of Carvajal's mother and sisters in the author's self-fashioning. Unlike many narratives of crypto-Judaism, Perelis does not exalt a gendered domestic space in the preservation of Iberian Judaism by emphasizing the role of women in preparing kosher food and secretly conducting Jewish domestic rituals. Rather, Perelis presents a group of men and women alike who engage different facets of Judaism—ritual, theological, eschatological—through textual study.
The final two chapters of Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic are the book's most important contribution. Here, Perelis explores the intersection of blood, race, and faith in the Jewish Atlantic. Chapter 4 presents Manuel Cardoso de Macedo's Vida del buenaventurado Abraham Pelegrino, using the role of blood in this narrative as an entrée into questions of race and religion in the early modern period. Cardoso, an Old Christian who converts to Judaism, uses his Vida to try to write himself into the mainstream Sephardic Jewish community as he grapples with his lineage and with the complicated social and ethnic bonds of the early modern Sephardic Atlantic. His Vida is almost penitential, in his longing to feel less marginal in the Sephardic community.
In the fifth and final chapter, Perelis introduces Antonio de Montezinos (alias Aharon Levi) and his work Relación. Originally an oral testimony to Amsterdam's Sephardic leadership in 1644, the Relación tells the story of Montezinos's five-year journey through New Granada and his encounters with Andean Amerindians. Montezinos's account revolves around his “discovery” of the Reubenites in the Americas, and the secrets of ancient Judaism, which he believes they possess. Here too, Perelis analyzes the role of emotion in the spiritual journeys of this early modern author, whose narrative hinges on the relationship between Jews and America's indigenous peoples, and the role of secrecy, blood, and family.
Perelis draws our attention to the oft-neglected role of text and religious study in the lives of crypto-Jews and New Christians in the early modern Sephardic Diaspora. The texts produced by Carvajal, Cardoso, and Montezinos mention various theological and historical works that were central to each of their religious identities. Generally, scholarship on the Sephardic Atlantic tends to focus on trade and economics, rather than literature and canonical texts, as central to Sephardic communal identity. In Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic, we see that the Atlantic space was rich with theological and textual exchange, and that scholarship played an important role in the western Sephardic Diaspora. One example is that, throughout Carvajal's Vida, we learn about the various theological writings that guide his religious awakening. At one point while imprisoned for Judaizing, Carvajal declared to his cellmate who was a Catholic monk: “What would I have given to have been enlightened by the truth of God outside of this prison … in monasteries, which generally have open libraries filled with sacred Scriptures and many other a good book” (46). Perelis notes that the two cellmates shared “the same dream of free access to religious texts” (47). A fuller engagement with these central theological works would have further emphasized the significance of literature and scholarship in early modern Sephardic life.
Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic provides a fascinating introduction to the spiritual autobiographies and complicated religious paths of a number of Jewish authors in the early modern Sephardic Atlantic. Using the tools of literary analysis, the book underscores the centrality of family and emotions in the self-representation of several key figures of the time. Through the narratives of Carvajal, Cardoso, and Montezinos, Perelis transforms the Atlantic world into an intimate space—charged with emotion, embroiled in deep familial connections, and populated by communities forged of faith and blood.
