PROBLEMS IN STUDYING HIDDEN PEOPLE
Crypto Jewish Literature
by Michelle M. Hamilton, University of California, Irvine From HaLapid, Summer 2007 This essay aims to position the study of crypto Jews and Crypto Jewish literature in the context of larger trends or theoretical issues currently debated in the Anglo-American Academy. In it I also explore how crypto Jewish writings continue to speak to us today and how are they relevant to literary scholars working outside of Jewish and/or Spanish Studies or working in recent historical periods. Crypto Jews and their culture(s) exemplify and complicate in fascinating ways current theoretical models of identity, alterity, and diaspora, as well as Empire and the transnational deployed by scholars working in several disciplines and subspecialties, including, but by no means limited to, philosophy, political theory, anthropology, and history, as well as literatures of Europe and the Americas. Important in understanding how crypto Jews and their culture engages with these various contemporary critical turns is an attempt at defining what in fact constitutes Crypto Jewish identity, i.e. what is a Crypto Jew, as well as what defines or distinguishes Crypto Jewish cultural production (including literature). How is a Crypto Jewish poem different from a contemporary Spanish or Mexican poem and/or how is a Crypto Jewish work different from a Jewish work? As we shall see the very difficulty that arises when trying to define someone either based on an ethnic legacy that has purposely been falsified or has simply become fuzzy after generations of persecution or based on their personal/interior belief system—beliefs and identities not only hidden but also constantly in flux—reveals a pre-modern example of what in the past 20-30 years has become, thanks in large part to the contemporary critical turn to cultural studies, identity politics. The increased interest of the past 30 years on “minority voices,” to use an antiquated expression, is responsible for the shift away from great works and the canon and a new appreciation of a variety of other literatures and authors, as well as use of hyphenated terms to designate contemporary hybrid subjects whose compounded identities reveal histories of diaspora and migration (African-Americans, Native-Americans) and/or mark non-normative beliefs or practices (Gay Americans, etc.). The hyphen in crypto Jew similarly serves to distinguish its referent from a larger more inclusive group, namely the Jewish people. Crypto Jews, however, are not simply a sub-group of Jews, they constitute, at least in the Iberian world post 1391, an uneasy category of religious/racial/national identity somewhere between Jew and Christian, and I would argue that the hyphenated identity at play is really that of the Christian-Jew—arguably a term so controversial and unpalatable to both the groups in question that it simply can not be deployed. The crypto Jew, this Jew that is not One, exists in the “in-between” as defined by Homi Bhabha in his 1994 seminal study, The Location of Culture, as the spaces between cultures, which in contemporary literary theory are also sometimes called the interstices or the overlap of cultures. These cultural spaces are fluid and invite the creation of new identities and new subjects. A given Crypto Jew (say from the early 15th century) brought up attending Catholic school and mass, but also attending the bris, bar-mitzvahs, weddings and funerals of members of the immediate family sees the world differently from Jewish relatives and differently from their fellow Catholic parishioners. Crypto Jewish cultural production—the memoirs, poetry, drama, and other literary works they compose—reveal just such a hybrid subject position between the well-defined religious categories of Jew and Christian deployed in the Hispanic world. Crypto-Jewish literature is de facto controversial because it rubs up against most of the categories constructed from the Middle Ages to the present to define or categorize people—be they categories of religious, ethnic, or linguistic differences. This has been especially noticeable in the ways Spanish and Jewish scholars have approached Crypto Jewish literature in the various manifestations it has had over time—from the last years of the fourteenth to well into the eighteenth-century as Jews lived in secrecy in the far-flung corners of the Spanish Empire. Many of those converts of the pogroms and forced conversions of 1391, as did their fellow converts who gave in to increasing pressure through the course of the fifteenth-century, continued to live either within or next to their Jewish neighbors and to write in Hebrew for at least another half century. Much of this fifteenth-century literature is classified and read as Hebrew/Jewish literature. Certain texts, however, as I will discuss below, make such a facile classification impossible and force us to question these paradigms. Many converts, and particularly the children of converts, also begin to write in the vernacular—in Castilian, in Aragonese, in Leonese, etc.—and their work complicates not only their inclusion within Hebrew Literature, but also the nationalist ideals undergirding the conceptions of Jewish and Spanish Literature—and is further complicated by the work of such authors as Shem Tob de Carrión, a Jew who did not convert but similarly chose to write in both Spanish and in Hebrew. Scholars working in Spanish literature (Hispanists) have adopted the term converso to apply to authors who had converted to Christianity and who wrote in Spanish or the vernacular. For Hispanists, Converso literature covers not only literature written by Jewish converts to Christianity during the fifteenth century before the Edict of Expulsion, but also the literature of their descendents—both those that remained on the Peninsula and those in the diaspora--in the centuries following 1492, many of whom repented and attempted to return to Judaism. The complexity of defining who is a Crypto Jew—those who convert to save their life as opposed to “sincere” converts, those who follow Jewish rituals, or those who could not but attempted as best they could without a community or rabbi, but inadvertently adopted Christian customs to a syncretic personal ritual, or those who simply had a Jewish mother, grandmother or ancestor but adhere to no Jewish cultural traditions—complicates not only how and who studies them today, but also the nature of their literary production. The literature produced in Hebrew on the Iberian Peninsula, especially that of the so-called Golden Age, has long been the object of study of Hebraists. Some experts on the Golden Age, such as Hayyim Schirmann and Heinrich Brody also studied later Judeo-Iberian poets, including those of the fifteenth-century such as Profiat Duran, David Bonet, Vidal Benveniste and Solomon Dapiera--all of whom converted to Christianity. While Schirmann and Brody study such authors as part of the Hebrew literary tradition, they do not clearly address a series of questions to which these texts give rise—questions that lay at the heart of the study of Crypto Jewish literature. We know these men converted to Christianity, but they were born and raised and spent a great part of their adult lives as Jews. We have several of their surviving poems—all written in Hebrew. But were these poems written before or after their conversion? Does it affect how we read and interpret it? Is it Jewish literature if written before? Is it Christian literature if written after (even if it is written in Hebrew and still adapts the meters and themes popular in Hebrew poetry written by Jews)? One of the best-known historians of the Jews of Spain, Yitzhak Baer, offers a nationalist approach to these kinds of authors and their literary production—he accepts them as Jews and as victims of forced conversions. Baer, as do many other historians such as Cecil Roth and as did Schirmann, focus on these converted authors as members of the Jewish community and as authors of Jewish literature. However, these authors were also Iberians, often with important official positions, and as such were not divorced from what was going on in the larger, predominantly Christian, culture—and this is where those scholars trained in Spanish literature and culture come into the picture. The Spanish critic, Américo Castro, called attention to the importance of both Jewish and Arabic culture to the formation of modern Spain, but he did so during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, whose own internal propoganda promulgated an image of a chaste, pure Catholic nation—a nation that had fought long and hard through such enterprises as the Edict of Explusion, the Inquisition and the military campaign against the Muslim inhabitants of the Peninsula (the Reconquista) to maintain its pure Christian bloodlines. While Castro’s ideas did not sway medieval studies in Spain under Franco, as an exile in Argentina and later in the U.S., Castro did lay the seeds for a new generation of scholars working on medieval Spain. Castro’s students include the great Stephen Gilman who both canonized the late fourteenth-century Celestina and popularized Castro’s thesis of the author’s converso origins, basing his own theory of perspectivism—the idea that a converso work reveals a particular jaded view of Catholic Imperial Spain unique to the marginalized and persecuted converso subject—on those of his teacher. As a fellow Spaniard and junior Andalusian colleague of Castro, Francisco Márquez Villanueva, working like Castro in the U.S., absorbed the latter’s lessons and, although in retirement, continues to produce incisive studies about the nature of converso thought and cultural production, as well as the contribution of conversos to Spanish literature, perhaps most brilliantly with his studies of Cervantes and Don Quijote. The number of contemporary Hispanists that work on Crypto Jewish (including converso) literature has grown tremendously in the last 20 years, thanks in large part, to the work of Castro and his continuators. The publication in one of the most respected journals of medieval Spanish Studies in the U.S., La Córonica, of the critical cluster entitled “Inflecting the Converso Voice” in 1996 (edited not coincidentally by one of Márquez Villanueva’s students, Gregory Hutcheson), marks a watershed event within Spanish Studies. This volume helped to bring the study of Crypto Jewish literature out of the shadows and into the main stream of Spanish Studies. While the bibliography of important scholarly articles and monographs on crypto Jewish/ converso literature and culture produced in the past 20 years is beyond the scope of this paper, some of the leading experts include Gregory Kaplan, Renée Levine Melammed, David Gitlitz, Colbert Nepaulsingh, and Bruce Rosenstock. I, too, as a student of another of Castro’s student, Samuel G. Armistead, acknowledge Castro’s influence on my own work, which includes studies of texts from the several different stages and manifestations of Crypto Jewish Literature. My most recent project involves a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript recorded in Hebrew letters, but whose language is a mix of the Northern Iberian dialect known as Aragonese and Castilian. On the basis of the handwriting and the watermarks in the manuscript’s paper I was able to determine that it was recorded by an Aragonese Jew sometime around 1450. The nature of the texts included is astounding. It includes a copy of works by Seneca as well as a list of the Hebrew philosophical terms used in ibn Tibbon’s translation of Maimonides’ Moreh Nebuchim. More surprisingly is the inclusion of a didactic work by one of the most famous conversos of the time, Alfonso de la Torre, as well as a work considered emblematic not only of Spanish Christianity of the epoch, but of all of medieval European Christendom, namely the Danza de la Muerte, a macabre play-sermon in which a preacher exhorts the listener to repent while a parade of victims, including the pope, cardinals, bishops, and lesser clerics, are taken by the grim reaper. What this strange selection of texts in Spanish but written in Hebrew reveals to us is that its author was a very learned Jew or New Christian (this Jew that is not one) totally conversant in the courtly conventions of Aragón and Castilla, familiar with converso literature in Spain, as well as with the history of Jewish philosophical though in Iberia going back to the eleventh-century Maimonides. The focus of this project is to investigate who could have produced such a manuscript—who could have possessed such a breadth of knowledge—and what does that tell us not only about their community of fellow Jews and Crypto Jews, but also about learned Iberia and Iberians at the time. The study of this and similar mid-fifteenth-century Crypto Jewish texts require, beyond the considerable time investment and language training in a variety of languages, including Hebrew, Castilian, Provençal and Aragonese, several other skills including paleography, codicology, the history of Spanish literature, a history of Jewish involvement in Iberian courts, as well as a knowledge of Jewish philosophy and the historical development of Aristotelian rationalism among Judeo-Iberian and Judeo-Provençal scholars. Traditionally trained scholars seldom possess these skills. As most American, European and even Israeli universities are organized into discrete units that emphasize either geo-political areas along nationalist lines (Spanish, the Middle East, Latin America) or along linguistic lines (the Spanish-speaking world, the Semitic languages/ Near Eastern Studies), or emphasize historical periods (Centers for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Institutes of Postcolonial Studies or Critical Theory), or even ethnic identity (Jewish Studies, Latino or Chicano Studies, etc.), the study of Crypto Jews, who do not fit nicely into any of these fields or specialties as developed within these differing institutional settings, has to a certain extent fallen between the cracks. Our academic training as Spanish scholars in Jewish history or literature covers only aspects of the material culture, the historical contexts, and the shifting identities of the Sephardim (including the Crypto Jews) in the Hispanic World. The solution for several recent scholars working on Sephardic history and literature has been to work collaboratively—a technique not unfamiliar to scholars in the sciences and social sciences, but still to a large degree unfamiliar within the humanities. The aforementioned Sam Armistead was one of the first wave of collaborative scholars; Armistead, trained as a medieval Hispanist, teamed up with Joe Silverman who had a background in Jewish Studies, and the musicologist Israel Katz, to begin extensive study of Sephardic culture, particularly ballads. The Spanish Hebraist and expert in the Hebrew poetry of medieval Spain, Angel Sáenz Badillos has collaborated throughout his career with experts in Jewish Studies including Judith Targarona and Israel Levin to author studies on Judeo-Iberian Literature, and with Arabists such as Francisco Corriente for comparative studies of the Hebrew and Arabic poetry of Iberia. More recently Sáenz Badillos and Spanish Hebraist, Esperanza Alonzo have teamed up with the specialists in poetry of the Golden Age in both Hebrew and Arabic, Ross Brann and Raymond Scheindlin, to foster scholarship and produce studies linking scholars working in Spanish, English, Hebrew and Arabic. These collaborations point to the complexity not only of potential Crypto Jewish literature, but of medieval and early modern Spanish literature as well. As Gregory Hutcheson points out, “historical studies over the past decade have continually pointed to late-medieval/early-modern Spain as the site of an extremely provocative socio-cultural matrix that anticipates many of the questioned posed by postmodern criticism.” In the past decade literary scholars are beginning to explore how Crypto Jewish literary works complicate ideas about both Jewish and Spanish Literature. We see this not only with the collaborative studies between Hebraists and Hispanists, but also with the growing focus on converso literature within Spanish Studies. Hutcheson claims that Benzion Netanyahu’s study, Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain, in which the latter claims that few of the Jewish converts to Christianity did not sincerely adopt their new faith, “will undoubtedly serve as a lightening rod for attention to late-medieval Spain—and to the converso question in particular—as a natural extension of postcolonial inquiry into matters of race, class, and nationalism.” We are now witnessing a development of this line of inquiry, which corresponds to contemporary theoretical debates around what constitutes identity—whether it is an essence (being born Jewish) or performance (going to mass or Yom Kippur services, for example). Recent studies such as those of Gregory Kaplan, E. Michael Gerli, Amy Aaronson-Friedman, and Dayle Seidenspinner Nuñez examine Crypto Jewish literature and authors in light of how they represent themselves and others. Seidenspinner Nuñez reads several canonical Spanish texts by converso authors as veiled attacks of the anti-converso policies of the Spanish monarchy. But it is Gregory Kaplan who develops most fully what marks a converso or late medieval Spanish text as being Crypto Jewish. Kaplan illustrates how convero authors deployed a series of images, metaphors and allusions (what he calls semions) that both evoke and create a web of meanings linked specifically to “a Jew, a Jewish object, or a distinctive feature of the Jewishness by which conversos were identified as inferior,” thus to realities particular to the social milieu of late medieval Spain. Kaplan calls this particular set of images and the way in which it was used by converso authors the “Converso code,” but is careful to point out that “code” “is not meant to imply that the writers” he studies “created a secret discourse that was only comprehensible to conversos. The meaning of the semions in the converso code might have been discerned by both Old and New Christian readers.” In his study Kaplan wrangles with one of the central issues facing those of us who study Crypto Jewish literature, their alterity or otherness. Kaplan argues that a consideration of the Otherness of converso and Crypto Jews is not only a historical reality, but a shaping, defining force in their literature. However, he also recognizes that by marking the converso as Other, he is essentially repeating the exclusionary attitude of medieval Spanish society: The question of alterity and how one deals with it in literary studies—how we as critics present and contextualize the voices of others—particularly those that historically have not been allowed to speak, including women and indigenous, non-Western colonial subjects has been the focus of much of recent literary theory and lays at the heart of postcolonial studies. The members of the Subaltern Studies Group are perhaps the most well known of literary and cultural critics working on this topic. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, foremost member of the group, whose focus has been the subaltern, particularly South Asian women and the postcolonial English legacy, has provocatively explored the power politics behind those who speak for the subaltern—including especially postcolonial critics in the Anglo-American Academy--famously questioning whether the subaltern can speak at all. I think one could claim that Leonor de Carvajal, the Crypto Jew who, while being tortured by the Inquisition, confessed to maintaining a Crypto Jewish lifestyle for years in sixteenth-century New Spain and who was then burned at the stake in 1596, but whose poems and memories survive in Inquisitorial records, is a subaltern subject whose voice can compare with that of other voices displaced or even eliminated by more contemporary imperial projects, such as the British occupation of India. Studies of Leonor de Carvajal’s recuperated voice, like those of the other members of the family, are poignant examples of the ways contemporary critics approach and inevitably frame such material according to their/our own theoretical or personal agendas. While I do not believe we should leave these texts in the manuscripts where they are copied without publishing them in modern studies because we undoubtedly impose upon them our own agendas, I do think that such theoretical questioning will help us to both reexamine our own representations of such voices as well as the ways in which we read other’s who present us with Crypto Jewish voices from the past, and particularly the ways in which modern critics tells us those voices should be heard. The critical questions raised by Subaltern Studies clearly have much to offer to, and are already being explored by several of us working with Crypto Jewish literature. However the Crypto Jewish experience could also be engaged quite productively from a newer, although not unrelated area of postmodern inquiry—that of Empire, diaspora, nation and the transnational subject—not only locating Crypto Jews and their literature as part of Spain and the Spanish Empire, but framing them as global or supranational social networks. Negri and Harding’s book on Empire (2002), among many other recent studies, focuses on the disintegration of the nation states that were the dominant political and cultural organizational paradigms of the eighteenth-twentieth centuries and the emergence of new transnational or supranational organizations, institutions and patterns of thought precipitated by many factors, including technological breakthroughs, trade and terrorism. Although Hardt and Negri claim supranational culture and ways of thinking for the twenty-first century, Crypto Jews existed, and arguably continue to exist, within a series of nations and Empires, sometimes resisting identification with, and representing themselves within their literature as outside of the national or imperial identities cultivated within those societies, and often instead imagining and representing themselves as part of a larger, supranational network of peoples. Whether in diaspora or within the Metropole—Spain itself—Crypto Jews and their cultural production complicate in exciting ways these theories of the postmodern/postcolonial and even transnational world. In conclusion, the study of the literature of the crypto Jews as I have examined it, chiefly with respect to the Jews of Iberia and their descendents from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, ideally requires the skills of the Hispanist familiar with the history, literatures, languages and manuscript culture of the late medieval and early modern Iberian Peninsula, but it also requires a knowledge of Jewish history, culture and textual practices, as well as the languages of the Jewish diaspora (including Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish and Greek). The requirements necessary to study this culture and literature gives us a glimpse of the often vast erudition of crypto Jews who managed to bridge and live within or between two and often more cultures, as well as of the complexity of what it meant to be a crypto Jew—this Jew that is and is not one—this Christian that is and is not one. Of course very few scholars can hope to master all these skills and the solution many contemporary scholars have made has been to work collaboratively. And I think it is important to note that while these scholars study a history of oppression and persecution based on ethnic/racial and religious intolerance, such collaborations between American, Spanish, Israeli, Christian and Jewish scholars nevertheless serve as a contemporary example of inter-faith, inter-linguistic and inter-ethnic cooperation designed to bridge cultural and linguistic differences, and this, I think, is a fitting testimony to the crypto- Jewish experience. END NOTES 1 According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica “Crypto Jews” are “persons who while secretly remaining faithful to Judaism practiced another religion which they or their ancestors were forced to accept.” “Crypto Jews,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (EJ), 22 vols. Detroit: Macmillan Reference, Keter Publishing, 2007. 5: 315. The Iberian Peninsula was home to Crypto Jews from the time of the Visigoths in the 7th-century; however, it is the mass conversions enacted after 1391 that created the best-known and most-studied Crypto Jews in the Hispanic tradition. “Anusim,” Yom Tov Assis, EJ, 2: 251. 2 Thomas F. Glick suggests something similar in “On Converso and Marrano Ethnicity,” Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardi World (1391-1648), ed. Benjamin Gampel. New York: Columbia U P, 1998. 59-76, in which he stresses the performative nature of crypto-Jewish identity, characterizing them as “cultural commuters” comfortable in both Judaism and Christianity—adopting one or the other when the social context requires it. 3 Bhabha, Location, 7. 4 For more on 1391 and its legacy see J. N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms (1250-1516). Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. 139-162. 5 Examples include critics such as Hayyim Schirmann, Heinrich Brody, Dan Pagis, Ross Brann, Raymond Scheindlin, Tova Rosen, and Rina Drory (among many others). Schirmann’s study Ha-Shira ha-ivrit be-Sefarad ve-be-Provença. 2 vols. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1956, provides us with hundreds of texts and locates these authors within the Iberian Peninsula—telling us where they were born, who their friends and correspondents were, and what their works are about as well as analyzing some of their formal aspects. 6 “Solomon Bonafed,” EJ, 4:54. Brody, Beiträge zu Solomon da-Piera’s Leben und Werken nebst Auszügen aus sienem Diwan. Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffman, 1893. 7 A History of the Jews in Christian Spain. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961. 8 Gilman. The Art of the Celestina, Madison: U Wisconsin, 1956; The Spain of Fernando de Rojas, Princeton: Princeton U P, 1972. 9 Some of Márquez Villanueva’s publications include De la España Judeoconversa. Bellaterra, 2006; Cervantes en Letra Viva. Bercelona: Reverso, 2005; Personajes y temas del Quijote. Madrid: Taurus, 1975. 10 Melammed, A Question of Identity. Oxford U P, 2004 and Heretics or Daughters of Israel? Oxford U P, 1999; Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996; Nepaulsingh, Apples of Gold in Filigrees of Silver. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1995; Rosenstock, New Men: Conversos, Christian Theology, and Society in Fifteenth-Century Castile. London: Queen Mary and Westfield College, 2002. For Kaplan see note 17 below. 11 Preliminary publications on this text include, Hamilton, “Text and Context: A Judeo-Spanish Version of the ‘Danza de la muerte’” in Converso Voices. Eds. Amy Aaronson-Freedman and Gregory Kaplan. Leiden: Brill. Forthcoming 2008; and Hamilton and María Morrás. “Un nuevo testimonio de la Danza de la muerte.” Actas VIII Congreso Internacional de la AHLM. 1999. 1341-1352. 12 Armistead’s publications with Joe Silverman and others include, Hispania Judaica: Studies on the History, Language and Literature of the Jews in the Hispanic World. Vols. 1, 2 and 3. Barcelona: Puvill, 1980, 1982, 1984; and Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews. Vols. 1-5. U California (vols 1-3) 1986, 1994, Juan de la Cuesta (vols. 5) 2005 (vols. 4, 6-7 in press). 13 Sáenz Badillos’ publications include Poetas hebreos de al-Andalus (ss. X-XII). Antología. (with J. Targarona) Córdoba: El Almendro, 1988; Autores Judíos de Sefarad. Diccionario. (with J. Targarona). El Almendro, 1991; Si me olvido de ti, Jerusalén... Cantos de las Sinagogas de al-Andalus (with Israel Levin). Córdoba: El Almendro, 1992; "Apostillas a las xarajāt árabes en muwaššah)āt hebreas." (with F. Corriente), Romania Arabica. Geburtstag, ed. J. Lüdtke, Tübingen, 1996, 281-298; Encuentros y desencuentros. Spanish-Jewish Cultural Interaction Throughout History. Eds. C. Carrete, et al. Tel Aviv: University Publishing Projects, 2000. 4 Sáenz Badillos worked with Scheindlin for the Hispanic-North American Committee for Educational and Cultural Affairs on the Project, “Arabic Influences on Hispano-Hebraic Literature.” Sáenz Badillos also has co-authored several articles including, with R. Brann, “The Poetic Universe of Samuel ibn Sasson, Hebrew Poet of 14th Century Castile." Prooftexts 16, 1996, 75-103. 15 La Corónica 25.1 (1996): 4. 16 Ibid., 4-5; see also B. Netanyahu, Origins of the Inquisition, New York: Random House, 1995, xix. 17 Kaplan, The Evolution of Converso Literature. U P Florida, 2002 and “Toward the Establishment of a Christian Identity: The Conversos and Early Castilian Humanism,” La Corónica 25.1 (1996), 53-67; Gerli, “Performing Nobility: Mosén Diego de Valera and the Poetics of Converso Identity,” La Corónica 25.1 (1996), 19-36; Amy Aaronson-Friedman, “Identifying the Converso Voice,” PhD diss. Temple University, 2000; and Seidenspinner Nuñez, “Conversion and Subversion: Converso Texts in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Eds. M. Meyerson and E. English. U Notre Dame P, 2000. 241-261. 18 “Conversion and Subversion,” 241-261. 19 Kaplan, Evolution, 32-39. 20 Ibid., 37. 21 Ibid., 38. 22 Spivak, “Can the Sub-Altern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. U Illinois Press, 1988. 271-313. 23 Among such studies are those of Martin Cohen, The Martyr; The Story of a Secret Jew and the Mexican Inquisition in the Sixteenth Century. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973, and Seymour B. Liebman, The Jews in New Spain; Faith, Flame, and the Inquisition. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1970. My own articles on Leonor de Carvajal’s poetry, “La poesía de Leonor de Carvajal y la tradición de los criptojudíos en Nueva España.” Sefarad 60:1 (2000), 75-93, position her according to a series of Spanish poetic texts. 24 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Harvard University Press, 2002. |
Society For Crypto Judaic Studies
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