This translation of Wachtel's 2001 work makes available to Anglophone readers extensive reconstructions of inquisitorial dossiers from sixteenth- through eighteenth-century Latin America and Portugal. Chapters 1–8 are case studies that contain no signposting explicitly relating them to the sweeping discussion of the phenomenon they are intended to exemplify, namely “Marranism.” That concept is the subject of the Introduction and the Conclusion.
Wachtel defines “Marranism” as a form of solidarity that baptized descendants of Iberian Jews experienced toward their ancestors and expressed through a diverse, dissident religiosity that the Holy Office categorized as “Judaizing” or simply as “Judaism.” Yet Marranism as a concept is “much broader than crypto-Judaism in the strict sense” (289, n.4): The “Marrano condition,” Wachtel avers, was characterized by a “set of concerns” (3), including religious interiorism and ethnic loyalty, certain practices such as endogamy, constant geographic mobility, flesh-cutting at the shoulder as a kind of “circumcision” for women, and certain beliefs (chiefly fidelity to “the Law of Moses” as a soul-saving inheritance). Wachtel argues that Marranism was born of a multigenerational tension between the conversos’ Christian education and their memory of a Jewish heritage. That tension, he concludes, generated in “Marranos” a modern “critical distance” (2), “skeptical detachment,” as well as a tendency toward “theological bricolage” (243); it bred “hesitations, doubts, vacillations” (2), contradiction (3), cultural “hybridization,” the placing of value on clandestinity (243), and “double allegiances” (3). Each of the eight middle chapters, and an Epilogue that recounts the stories of contemporary “Marrano Jews” (269) whom Wachtel interviewed in Brazil, is meant to illustrate one or more of the above characteristics of “Marranism.”
Chapter 1 relates the story of Juan Vicente, a peripatetic judeoconverso from Portugal whose public shaming at an auto da fe and at his home parish was typical of Luso-Brazilian cases from the mid 1500s. Chapter 2 narrates the case of the Brazilian martyr Francisco Maldonado da Silva. Though Wachtel does not mention this, Maldonado's reckless defense of a “Judaism” drawn exclusively from the study of the Old Testament and Christian sources offers an unusually transparent picture of nonconformist religiosity because the inquisitors were interested in debating and preserving Maldonado's ideas for the benefit of other inquisitors.
Chapter 3 treats the case of Manuel Bautista Perez, victim of an inquisitorial purge in Lima (1635–1639). A successful merchant, his socio-economic profile reflects his place in the upper echelons of the Lusoconverso trading “Nation” (nação/nación). Chapter 4 reconstructs the dossiers of Leonor Nuñez, who died at the stake in 1649, and several others in her familial circle in Mexico City, including alleged “dogmatists,” as well as people accused of methodically engaging in sexual promiscuity as a way of fulfilling “the Law of Moses.”
Chapter 5 recounts the trials of Francisco Botello, a New Christian, and his Old Christian wife, María de Zárate, who allegedly tolerated each other's differing religious practices. Chapter 6 deals with Fernando de Medina, a baptized grandson of judeoconverso immigrants to France, whose defiant testimony bespoke “atheistic skepticism” (182) and religious relativism mixed with the Jewish pride Medina had acquired in Peyrehorade. Chapter 7 discusses the syncretistic religiosity of Theresa Paes de Jesus and her family. Between 1718 and 1720 in Brazil, Paes confessed that she considered Queen Esther to be the mother of the biblical Moses, and that Moses was God. Chapter 8 treats dossiers of the family of the enlightened playwright António da Silva, “O judeu,” who poignantly wrote, “If being guilty is not to be guilty, then I am guilty.” His dossier is a main focus of the chapter.
Fascinating documents anchor the study, yet its nomenclature, methodology, and ambitious thesis are problematic. Pace Wachtel (3), the archaic term “Marrano” (swine), as applied to people, still carries pejorative connotations. Further, the term “Marrano” rarely appears in the historical record. By contrast, the inquisitorial dossiers are replete with possible alternatives such as “judaizer,” “judeoconverso,” “New Christian” (pejorative, yes, but less crude than “Marrano”), and “of the Nation.”
The book concentrates on allegations of sincere “crypto-Judaism” and almost always endorses them, however tacitly. Consequently, Wachtel's assurances that Marranism was not mere Judaizing, that judeoconversos and their beliefs were very diverse, and that the book will not read inquisitorial sources credulously (15, 102), ring somewhat hollow. An exception is the case of António da Silva, though Wachtel suspects that the playwright nonetheless Judaized with his family. Sometimes the judeoconverso protagonists appear as “Jews” (e.g., 120) and their culture as “Judaism” or “Jewish” without qualification (e.g., 88, 257). Granted, Jewishness is not a fixed quality, but why appear to take the invidious inquisitorial concept of it at face value? The author wisely notes that inquisitorial edicts of faith may have helped diffuse a “common store” of Judaizing beliefs and customs (247). But why not consider the degree to which anti-Jewish propaganda may have taught and stimulated Judaizing within the ranks of a Jewishly-identified minority alienated from Catholic society by endemic bigotry?
Crucially, Wachtel does not spell out what standards he will apply to determine the credibility of testimony rendered to the Inquisition. In the end, the work, for all its questioning of ambiguous sources and its references to inquisitorial coercion, treats nearly all accusations and confessions, including those provided by jailhouse informants, as essentially credible. The book also tends to conflate the Holy Office's understanding of defendants––and its dogged probing of their ethnic bonds on the assumption that such bonds were directly related to religious deviance––with the defendants' own motivations and elusive self-understanding. For instance, regarding Leonor Nuñez's circle, Wachtel notes that “the unusual density of inquisitorial prosecutions of the same family would indicate a core group characterized by Marrano religiosity” (69). The fact that the family was subjected to many prosecutions, however, is no basis for presuming that the defendants upheld a semi-modern, hybridized “faith.” A more judicious interpretation might have noted that the family's immediate origin in France, where normative Judaism enjoyed tacit toleration, suggests the possibility that at least some members of the family secretly observed rabbinic traditions (as distinct from a semi-modern, hybridized “faith.”) (Evidence I have studied suggests that returnees to the “Lands of Idolatry” from France often suspended or attenuated their Jewish practices in Iberia in order to be safe.)
Another example: Wachtel proposes that Manuel Bautista Perez, who maintained his innocence under judicial torture and betrayed “no attachment whatsoever to Judaism” (66), nonetheless (!) held “dual beliefs” and a “dual sincerity,” and that his “faithfulness to the Law of Moses” may be understood as “more commemorative… than religious” (68). The proof adduced of this “Marranism” is thin: the merchant's membership in and dealings with the judeoconverso trading nation; a sardonic allusion he once allegedly made to the Law of Moses (thereby supposedly revealing a “Marranic” disillusionment); and the fact that his library included Christian works on aspects of Christian theology that “Marranos” allegedly rejected. But if mere respect toward ancestors somehow indicated a person's adherence to Mosaic law, which is hardly demonstrable, it is not clear how the comparatively self-taught “Judaism” of dogmatistas like Francisco Maldonado da Silva was a “remembered” faith. The difficulty is that once one asserts that dissimulation typifies “Marranism,” and presents circumstancial details as evidence of “faithfulness” to Mosaic Law, no accused New Christian can escape the imputation of fealty to an ancestral faith. For example, if Bautista Perez had not owned Catholic works, the Inquisitors—and Wachtel—would probably have interpreted this too as proof of his guilt. And, if no one had accused the defendant of joking bitterly, his conformism might be dismissed as a “Marranic” mask.
None of this is to say that Judaizing was an inquisitorial invention tout court, that ethnicity was insignificant to religious identity, or that a proto-modern cultural bricolage did not develop. It is only to say that “crypto-Judaism” and “Marranism” loom heavy in the work as elements of a totalizing anthropological schema imposed on source material that is more diverse and far more opaque than the study suggests.
