2001 ISSUE


THE MARRANOS: SECULAR JUDAISM IN THE NEW WORLD

Anita Novinsky

In 1992, countless studies were published all over the world on the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and on the fate of Sephardic Jewry. Nevertheless, it seems to me that not nearly enough has been said about New Christians and Marranos in the New World, where the majority of Jews who were expelled from the Iberian peninsula eventually found refuge.

Spanish and Portuguese chroniclers of the era, like Abraham Zacuto, astronomer to the Portuguese crown, and Andre Bernardes, chronicler of the Catholic Kings of Spain, recount that 180,000 Jewish refugees left Spain; of these, 120,000 entered Portugal. The appearance of such a large number of refugees, most of whom arrived with no resources at all, precipitated a grave imbalance in the social structure of Portugal, where Jews came to constitute over 15% of the population.

It was Don Jao II, King of Portugal, who arranged for the admission of Spanish Jews into Portugal. Payment of a head tax was required- and wealthy Jews paid quite a price. Thus, incredible sums of money entered the coffers of the Portuguese crown. Yet, despite the tall price, Portugal would not admit Jews except on condition that they leave the country after eight months. Don Jao knew that the Jews had neither the means to leave Portugal, nor any place to go from there. The King had, however, promised to provide them with boats.

But once their eight-month stay had lapsed, the King did not keep his promise, and the Jews suffered famine, the rape of their women, and the loss of their children. Don Jao caused all Jewish children between the age of two and ten to be arrested: he had them sent to the Island of Sao Tome and abandoned there, where they were devoured by wild animals. Even the Christians of the time spoke of this episode with indignation.

And so, the Jews were left to languish year after year along the borders of Portugal, homeless, ever fearful, hungry, and subject to the elements. They built huts for themselves, and even today the region where they found refuge is called "the valley of the huts." Yet throughout all of this the King had Jewish mathematicians, astronomers and cartographers employed in the service of the Portuguese crown.

Under the reign of Don Manuel, who succeeded Don Jao to the throne, the Jews' lot did not improve, and they were forced to convert to Catholicism - hence the origin of the term "New Christians," and the beginning of the epoch of the New Christians.

The Jews considered the calamity of their expulsion from Spain to be a divine punishment visited upon them by the will of God. It was a sign that "Yaweh" was present; for no Sephardic Jew understood this catastrophe as an historical phenomenon. The only historical explanation dating from this era was propounded by a Christian, Damiao de Gois, chronicler of Don Manuel, who wrote that the King had ordered the forced conversion of the Jews, and had kidnapped their children, but had not done likewise with the Arabs: the Arabs were given the option of leaving Portugal, "for the Arabs have kings and kingdoms where they could take revenge upon the Christians who live there; but the Jews own no land, they have neither kings nor empires of their own, and one may thus do any harm to them that one wishes."

Damiao de Gois may be deemed the first political Zionist of the modern era. Religious Zionism had always existed in the hearts of Jews, but this was the first time that political Zionism, which links the destiny of Jews with the absence of a national homeland, found expression.

No reference exists to help estimate the number of Jews who came to the New World with the first explorers. But we do know that the first Jew to arrive in America was Luis Torres, who came on Christopher Columbus' expedition. A converted Jew, Gaspar de Gama, came with Pedro Alvares Cabral, discoverer of Brazil. Gaspar de Gama played quite an important role as interpreter for Vasco de Gama and other navigators.

In 1502, only two years after the discovery of America, King Don Manuel leased all of Brazil to a group of converted Jewish merchants. Denominated New Christians, they were the first colonists in this southern portion of the New World. These converts were responsible for transplanting sugar cane from the Madeira Islands and Sao Tome to Brazil, and hence for making Brazil the largest sugar producer worldwide during the 17th century.

From the mid-16th century onward, greater and greater numbers of Jews began arriving in Brazil. In 1549, when the first governor of Brazil was appointed by Portugal, the first waves of New Christians began to arrive. Some of them were wealthy, and brought their capital with them; others came in order to flee the Inquisition, which was officially instituted in Portugal in 1536. Only when the riches of Brazil became known in Europe did the Inquisition decide to send emissaries there. At the end of the 16th century a branch of the Inquisition was established at the College of the Society of Jesus in Bahia, capital of colonial Brazil. Its role was to examine so-called acts of heresy: sorcery, bigamy, sodomy, and Judaism. Documentation from this period of the Inquisition has enabled us to learn about many aspects of colonial society.

The watchful eye of the Inquisition closed for good only at the end of the 18th century. Officially, the aims of the Inquisition were religious, but studies have revealed that the true objective of its persecution of the Jews was economic. The Vicar of Bahia, Manuel Temudo, wrote to the inquisitors in 1631 that the Jewish population was wealthy, and that it would therefore be possible to establish a court of the Inquisition without the Portuguese crown incurring any expenses: confiscation of local Jewish property alone would fund the enterprise. This court, for reasons which remain unfathomable to historians, was in fact never established.

The phenomenon of the New Christians, whom some authors call "Marranos," is not well understood. The term refers to the descendants of Jews - as though this group constituted an unified or homogeneous whole. In truth, Marranism does not come in one form, but many. There were substantial differences between regions, between generations, and often between members of the same family. There were three categories of New Christians in Brazil. The first is composed of Jews who were descendants of converts to Catholicism who had become true Catholics, having sincerely embraced the Catholic faith and become fully integrated into political and cultural life. Among these were some of the grandest personages in the colony - the Provincial of the Society of Jesus, Ignacio de Tolosa; Leonardo Nunes, author of the first Brazilian book of grammar; and another Jesuit, Jose de Anchieta, a proponent of evangelism often called the Apostle of Brazil, who was born of a Jewish mother.

The second category of New Christians is made up of people who clandestinely continued some Jewish practices (sometimes with limited awareness). These are the true Marranos. They were the true targets of the Inquisition, which brought them to Brazil to be judged and condemned. They are the true martyrs of Judaism.

The third group, by far the largest, was comprised of "nonbelievers" or "skeptics," who were neither Jews nor Christians. This group had conceived a different vision of the world - a world with no religious content, where God no longer answered their pleas. The inquisitors were the first to identify this population as Jews. The Inquisition posted edicts (called Edital, or Carta Monitoria) on church doors and in other public locations, containing explicit instructions on how to identify a Jew: "If a person claims that there is no more to life than being born and dying, he is a Jew; if he says that there is no Heaven for those who are good, or Hell for those who are evil, he is a Jew; and one who declares that fornication is not a mortal sin is a Jew."

The Inquisition identified New Christians by either their conduct or their identity. Accusations based on conduct focused on alleged Jewish practices, but these accusations were often false. Others were accused of being Jews because they identified with "the people of their Nation." Thus, paradoxically, the Inquisition was responsible for the creation of a conception of Jewish identity independent of religious practice.

Living for five or six generations in Brazil and Spanish America, in total isolation from their Jewish origins, these New Christians no longer retained a clear understanding of their religion. The Jewish practices in which they engaged were distinguished by syncretism; and yet they kept the Sabbath for over three centuries, they fasted on Yom Kippur, they celebrated the Jewish Passover, and retained some dietary restrictions as well.

The discriminatory legislation and persecution of the Inquisition left the New Christians with a profound aversion to the Catholic church, which they associated with the Inquisition. This aversion, combined with strong feelings of anticlericalism, led to "decatholicization" or "dechristianization" in the colony, a phenomenon which had long-term ramifications for Brazilian thought - even among the so-called "Old Christians." This is a very interesting phenomenon, since it was extremely difficult to live without religion in the 16th and 17th centuries. One had to be a Catholic, a Protestant, a Moslem or a Jew. Every individual was identified by his religion; there was virtually no secular population at that time. In this sense, the New Christians may be viewed as pioneers of the modern era, in that they were able to live without religion.

Let us consider this phenomenon in all of its complexity. Many New Christians lived as Jews even though they had no religious faith: although this is common in our day, it was quite extraordinary way back then.

Thus, Judaism in colonial Brazil didn't necessarily have anything to do with religion, and the officials of the Inquisition were well aware of this. Their persecution was pure anti-Semitism, in the modern sense of the word, with all of the political and racial overtones that this connotes. At some point during his trial, a person accused by the Inquisition was required to confess to which kind of Judaism he belonged: did he engage in "religious practices" or did he merely maintain "communication" with the "members of his nation." The New Christians lived in perpetual conflict between non-belief and a Jewish tradition that had, after so many generations, often been reduced to no more than vague associations. In their mental universe, there was no longer room for religious Judaism; but neither did they embrace the Catholic world into which they were supposedly integrated.

Here, the age-old paradox of converted Jews resurfaces: they are Jews in the eyes of Christians, Christians in the eyes of Jews. They define themselves as "neither Jew nor Christian, we are New Christians by the grace of God." In doing so, they proudly accept the stigma imposed upon them by society.

I have noted that the "dechristianization" of the New Christians played a determinative role in the formation of the modern Brazilian mentality; this was expressed quite clearly in the religious criticism of the 18th century. One example of this mentality was evidenced by Brazilian students at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, who were condemned by the Inquisition in 1779: their ideas, circulated secretly among their peers, were already current among the New Christians in Brazil in the 16th and 17th centuries. In terms of ideas about faith, the New Christians of Brazil antedated the great Luminaries of Europe by two hundred years.

Their worldview was characterized by a secular rationalism that was never organized as a movement but always remained an undercurrent of thought; it found expression in the negation of revealed religion and in transcendence. God existed for the New Christians, but in a different dimension: He was identified with the universe. As it came to predominate over the old religion, the rationalism of the New Christians touched upon the most extreme notions of atheism. And both the most erudite and the commoners among the New Christians firmly denied the immortality of the soul.

Colonial society in Brazil was thus a veritable hotbed of dissidence against the state's official Catholicism. The same phenomenon was present not only among the New Christians but among the indigenous population - the Indians - and imported African slaves as well. African religions, with their dances, their enchantment and their wizardry, were considered by the Church to be superstitions. And if the religion of the Indians was viewed as sorcery pure and simple, the non-belief of the New Christians was deemed categorically and unhesitatingly "Judaism." This aspect of official colonial history has only recently become the focus of ethnological and sociological study.

During centuries of indoctrination, and assisted by the Inquisition, the Catholic church attempted to homogenize the Brazilian population, inculcating the Catholic faith through fear and repression. But for all this the Church was unsuccessful. Sergio Buarque de Hollanda, one of the best known Brazilian historians, emphasized the fact that Catholicism in Brazil has never followed a strictly orthodox pattern.

The non-conformity of the New Christians never took the form of an open war against Catholicism and the establishment, but it nevertheless had a profound effect on these. The language it used, with its double meanings and multilayered connotations, created a universe of symbols conducive to a system of clandestine communication which rendered more difficult the task of the Inquisitors. They became expert at indefinite responses, masters of the "more or less." They frequently went by two or three different names, to make it more difficult to identify them.

Again, I would reiterate the fact that the de facto secularity of the New Christians had a considerable impact on Brazilian politics and the Brazilian mentality. It accounts for the involvement, toward the end of the 18th century, of so much of the population, in Freemasonry.

In order to get some inkling of the magnitude of this contradiction in Brazilian society, it is enough to point to Antonio Feijo, who insisted, during his rule in the 19th century, upon "decatholicizing" the country. And yet Feijo himself was a Catholic priest!

After centuries of persecution, Jews per se have disappeared in Brazil. In their stead lives a people torn between two irreconcilable worlds. The Jews have lost their God, but have found another God in the world. They have created a new world for themselves. The New Christians were indeed the true precursors of modern secular man.

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Anita Novinsky is a Professor of History of Brazil at University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and has written several papers and books on the history of the Jews in Brazil. She is engaged in Judeo-Arab and Judeo-Christian dialogue. She has recently published "Five Centuries of Jewish Presence in Brazil." She has published Inquisicao. Inventarios de bens confiscados a Cristaos novos. Fontes para a historia de Portugal e do Brasil. (Brasil-Secolo XVIII). (Sao Paulo, 1976).

This article first appeared in Issue 7 of the French Review Panoramiques entitled "Juifs Laiques du religieux vers le culturel." It is reprinted with permission of the editor.

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