The Myth of Converso Modernity

• In Event: Approaching Converso and Western Sephardic History

Abstract

From J.A. van Praag in 1948 to Yirmiyahu Yovel in 2009, a number of respected scholars have maintained or at least suggested that conversos, because of their complex experience of identity formation - living as suspected “Jews” in a Catholic environment, in the shadow of the Inquisition - became harbingers of a modern, skeptical sensibility. No doubt the famous seventeenth-century “heretics” of the Amsterdam community – Uriel da Costa, Baruch Spinoza, Daniel de Prado – were harbingers of modernity in this sense. But all over Europe, among Catholics, Protestants, and radical sectarians alike, such harbingers of modernity were appearing.

In this paper I will argue that the radical truth-seeking among members of the “Portuguese” diaspora was not (certainly not just) a consequence of their converso background. One might even say that these Jews, because culturally they were Europeans, were plagued by some of the same issues vis-à-vis Judaism that led to radical thinking among Christians. But just as not all Europeans were troubled by skeptical discourse, so too with conversos. Certainly it is a perversion of scholarship to project onto conversos as a group the psychic conflicts associated with a twentieth-century urban intelligentsia.

There have been two main reasons for the emergence of the myth of converso “modernity.” First, converso scholarship has paid special attention to the radical truth-seekers, beginning with Carl Gebhardt in 1937; their thinking was more accessible and more innovative than that of most conversos. Second, conversos seemed strikingly modern to scholars who grew up in a tradition of Jewish history that had a heavily Ashkenazi orientation. That is, in the context of the prevalent construction of Jewish history, the conversos did seem “ahead of their time.”

author

• Miriam Bodian, University of Texas at Austin