The Converso's Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture

THE CONVERSO’S RETURN

Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture

DALIA KANDIYOTI

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kandiyoti, Dalia, author.

Title: The converso's return : conversion and Sephardi history in contemporary literature and culture / Dalia Kandiyoti.

Other titles: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2020. | Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045178 (print) | LCCN 2019045179 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503612297 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503612433 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503612440 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Modern—21st century—History and criticism. | Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. | Marranos in literature. | Sephardim in literature. | Conversion in literature. | Ethnicity in literature.

Classification: LCC PN56.5.M37 K36 2020 (print) | LCC PN56.5.M37 (ebook) | DDC 809/.93382—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045178

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045179

Cover design by Angela Moody

Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 10.25/15 Adobe Caslon Pro

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture

Edited by David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: Lost and Found? The Afterlives of Conversion

CHAPTER 1: Doubles, Disguises, Splits: Conversos in Modern Literature and Thought

CHAPTER 2: Latinx Sephardism and the Absent Archive: Crypto-Jews and the Transamerican Latinx Imagination

CHAPTER 3: Return to Sepharad: Blood, Convergences, and Embodied Remnants

CHAPTER 4: Sephardis’ Converso Pasts: The Critical Genealogical Imagination

CHAPTER 5: Ottoman-Spanish and Jewish-Muslim Entanglements: Conversos in Contemporary Turkish Fiction

CODA

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

The Converso’s Return is a study of recent fiction and memoirs by U.S. Latinx, Spanish, French, and Turkish authors about the current revival of Iberian Jewish history, in particular, the largely forced conversions of Jews to Catholicism in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal. This seemingly remote history has been the topic of a substantial library of contemporary literary and popular writing, especially since the 1992 quincentennial commemorations of the 1492 conversions and expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and the conquest of the Americas. The recent claiming of Sephardi converso ancestry by Christian (and to a much lesser extent Muslim) descendants in the Americas, Europe, and Turkey has taken place simultaneously with the fictional and testimonial writing about conversos and their descendants by authors on several continents. What is it about conversos that has sparked their imagination? What do we learn and rethink about conversos’ afterlives, including their resurgence in the present, and how does this help us understand how and why we return to and resuscitate the past? The literary writing in English, Spanish, French, and Turkish, the languages of my competence, about the fate of the converts through the centuries that The Converso’s Return investigates help us to expand on ideas about conversos, contemporary historical consciousness, the role of genealogy in culture, collective memory, missing archives, Sephardi identities, and world literature.

Although I have a long-standing interest in modern Sephardi culture, language, and writing, what spurred me to undertake this project on conversos and their recent reappearance on the literary and social scene did not come from within what is considered normative Jewish culture and literature. Instead, I was inspired by texts in my related field of specialization in U.S. Latinx writing. I became aware after years of the study of Latinx and Chicanx literature that many authors, including those I analyze in The Converso’s Return, such as Achy Obejas and Kathleen Alcalá, have claimed crypto-Jewish descent and written imaginatively about converso identities and pasts. I had been aware of the media coverage of the secret Jews of New Mexico in the 1980s and early 1990s but had not explored these issues further until I realized how much they resonated with some of the Latinx and Chicanx writers I studied and taught. Starting with their works, which are characterized by crossings and convergences of cultures, languages, and histories, defined my choices of other writing: Each chapter is about a different context from the previous but concerns ideas and texts that are similarly compelled by connectivity and overlap of cultures and traumas in breathing new life into what might have been a forgotten, disappeared slice of history.

As the chapters to follow will make evident, I have learned and benefited greatly from many historians’ crucial contributions in shaping our knowledge about Iberian converts and their descendants. My overview of contemporary ideas and tropes about conversos in Chapter 1 includes a synthesis of historians’ views of crypto-Jewish identities. However, I am not a historian, and this book is not a historical study. The Converso’s Return does not seek to assert truths about crypto-Jewish pasts or assess the claims about its continuity. Rather, it is about how history is viewed and imagined creatively in our times. In relation to descendants of crypto-Jews, who include some of the authors I discuss, I explain the controversial issues surrounding claims to crypto-Jewish ancestries and identities. But my aim is not to evaluate, validate, or invalidate such claims. Instead, I signal their various implications when it is relevant to the literary and cultural analyses I undertake. I do not judge either the historical or the cultural authenticity, a distinction made by Seth Kunin (2009), of surviving crypto-Jewishness in the Americas, which would be inappropriate in any case to the literary, imaginative works I discuss. Even when a memoir is concerned (e.g., in Chapter 3), I explore the meanings and rhetoric of crypto-Jewish testimony and not its truth. I do not dismiss historians’ evaluations in one or the other direction or deny that there are stakes as to whether or not the claims are real, given also the involvement of organizations and states outside the converso-descendant world and the extensive emotional, social, and spiritual investment of many of those within it. However, my own goal is to investigate what the converso’s return reveals in literary writing with regard to our contemporary historical and genealogical imaginations. The book parses the consequences, implications, and forms of reviving the past in literary writing and analyzes the ways that narrating converso history opens a path to other, overlapping stories of conquests, exiles, and solidarities.

TERMINOLOGY

The choice of terminology has not been obvious or simple for any of the key terms in this book, which is an indication of their flexible, imperfect, and debated nature. Perhaps most difficult are the terms converso, crypto-Jew, and marrano. I choose converso instead of the English convert, because this is standard in the scholarship and because it helps to underline the Iberian specificity. Because I refer overwhelmingly to Jewish converts, or Judeoconversos, rather than Muslim ones, I underline here that the term converso, unless otherwise specified, pertains to Iberian Jews who have converted and, sometimes, to their descendants. Scholars have come to reject the conflation of the Jew with the crypto-Jew (practicing in hiding) and the converso (e.g., Graizbord and Stuczynski 2011; Kaplan 1997; J. Schorsch 2009). The distinction is meant to avoid a flattening among the terms that essentialize Jewishness, where all conversos must be thought of as secretly practicing Jews, which they were not, or where all converts who have Jewish ancestry are automatically considered Jews.

In the chapters that follow, converso refers to Jews who converted to Christianity whether by choice or under duress in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and crypto-Jew pertains to those who were known to retain secret Jewish practice and/or identity, whether in the historical record or in fiction. However, I also use converso as a neutral umbrella term for any kind of Iberian Jewish convert and refer to the two terms interchangeably, when both terms obtain in a particular context. Because of its pejorative connotations (the word’s possible origin being a demeaning and provocative reference to a pig) and due to decreasing use in most North American scholarship, I invoke marrano only in reference to other writers’ and scholars’ use. For example, in much French- and Spanish-language scholarship and fiction, marrano and marrane continue to be the terms of choice to refer to conversos, crypto-Jews, or both (in addition to other sui generis uses), as are marranisme and marranismo. In relation to the followers of Sabbatai Sevi and their descendants, I use the terms found in English- and Turkish-language scholarship as well as in the community: dönme, Sabbatean, or Salonican.

The term Sephardi is no less malleable or imperfect than the others. Although most of my own references in this book are to Iberian Jews, because of the particular topic and scope, I recognize, of course, that in many contexts Sephardi includes Jews not of Iberian origin.

I have adopted Latinx instead of Latina/o or Latino to refer to cultures and populations of the Caribbean and Latin America in the United States, as the term is currently favored by scholars in the field and community activists aiming for inclusiveness. However, Hispano and Hispanic are widely used outside academia and in many locations, so I also use this term whenever appropriate.

I have chosen not to adapt converso regarding gender, because to my knowledge, there is no call from identifying descendants or from scholars to do so. I treat converso as a gender-neutral term for abstract or general use and use converso and conversa when referring to individuals.

TRANSLATIONS

I have used the available published translations for all works and included original-language passages as well as translations for the primary texts. Translations of works from the Turkish, Spanish, and French originals that are not available in English are mine.

An early version of Chapter 2 was published in Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination, ed. Yael Halevi-Wise (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although I spent many solitary hours with this book, I have by no means been alone in the time I have devoted to it. I have leaned on, learned from, and received the support of many. All the book’s shortcomings are, of course, my own.

I acknowledge with gratitude the following granting institutions: the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York for the several grants that allowed me the time to start and complete this work; the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies (UCLA) for research support; the Mellon Foundation fellowship at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) that allowed me to attend a seminar on religion led by Brian Turner and coordinated by Lydia Wilson; and the College of Staten Island (CUNY) Provost Travel Grant. Carleton University, the Sephardi Studies program at the Graduate Center at CUNY, the Association of Jewish Studies, and my own College of Staten Island Department of English helped fund important presentations and panel organizing that served as the basis of chapters.

For precious feedback on various parts of this work, I am deeply grateful to Sarah Casteel (especially), Shari Huhndorf, Robert Latham, and Kerri Sakamoto. For invitations to deliver talks and workshops that furthered my project in extremely important ways, I thank Eva-Lynn Jagoe and the Latin American Studies program at the University of Toronto; Sarah Abrevaya Stein and the Maurice Amado Sephardic Studies Chair at UCLA; Ariana Vigil and the Latin/a-Jewish Studies Working Group at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Yael Halevi-Wise at McGill University; and Eduardo Manzana Moreno at CSIC (Consejo superior de investigaciones científicas) in Madrid for hosting and co-organizing our seminar on convivencia and multiculturalism.

I learned so much also from collaborating with the following great colleagues: Sarah Casteel, Tabea Linhard, and Michal Friedman, who co-organized seminars in Sephardi studies at CSIC, the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), and the CUNY Graduate Center; and Michal Friedman, Daniela Flesler, Adrián Pérez Melgosa, Stacy Beckwith, Tabea Linhard, and Asher Salah for putting together and enriching panels at ALCES (Asociación internacional de literatura y cine españoles, Siglo XXI), the ACLA, and the Association of Jewish Studies. The initiative and gentle leadership of Michal Friedman in several of these adventures were precious, as were the many professional and personal exchanges, travels, and laughs. Gracias to José Manuel Fajardo for inspiring us all with his work, commitment, and uplifting spirit and sense of humor. Fellow panel members and audiences at other conferences, including those of ACLA, ALCES, AJS, and MESEA, moved the work forward. Paloma Díaz-Mas at CSIC has been at some of the same events and also generously shared with me her important, extensive contributions to Judeo-Spanish language and culture. The feedback and the new horizons that opened up during all these exchanges nourished this book in profound ways in recent years, as did the earlier encounters with groundbreaking scholarship in Sephardi and Mizrahi studies, especially by Ella Shohat, Ammiel Alcalay, Aron Rodrigue, Esther Benbassa, and Sarah Abrevaya Stein. Directly and indirectly, they have inspired me to forge ahead in this field.

Late during the writing of this book, I started a new project with Rina Benmayor, who agreed to go on a joint oral history adventure. Unpredictably, my two projects coincided in productive ways that furthered some of the work in this book. Many thanks to Rina for helping me grow and for generously sharing her vast knowledge and experience in oral history, backing my overall work, and for our delicious exchanges in muestro espanyol.

I owe a huge debt to the work of the many Sephardi and Mizrahi studies scholars who traced the fascinating Sephardi routes; to the African Americanist and queer studies scholars who have changed our questions regarding history, returns, and archives; to the Latinx critique of mixture, race, and transamericanism, which is vast and has informed my endeavors since graduate school; to the research in memory and memorialization in Jewish, Spanish, and comparative studies; and to the study of difference in the context of Turkey and its past. Too numerous to identify here, they have been named in the pages to come and made their mark on this book. My years at the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University, where I received my Ph.D. with the formative influence of Sylvia Molloy, Richard Sieburth, and Jennifer Wicke, continue still, after all this time, to shape my outlook and encourage my impulse to connect the dots across languages and numerous boundaries. I remain grateful for that time and place.

My colleagues in the English Department, College of Staten Island (CUNY), Maryann Feola, Ellen Goldner, and Janet Ng, have inspired me, for too many years to count, with their own work and with their exceptional care for the collective. They have also been by my side throughout mi vida loca as a moving target while writing and teaching. Many thanks for all the rides too, Ellen! I am so thankful to have Sohomjit Ray’s intellectual stimulation, humor, and friendship at the department as well as at nerds’ night out at the Strand. Terry Rowden is a cherished colleague and friend who lifted my spirits and intellectually challenged me. I thank our chairs, Ashley Dawson and Lee Papa, who consistently used their capacity as long-term chairs to back my needs and projects. Together with the outstanding administrative team of Annmarie Franzese, Fredericka Grasso, Wendy Pearson, and Rita Rampullo, the chairs and members of the department have made it possible to have a peaceful and functional work environment, whatever challenges we face—this is something one cannot take for granted and has been essential to both teaching and scholarship. Thanks also to my colleagues in other departments, including especially to Bilge Yeşil, along with those in the Women and Gender Studies and Latin American, Caribbean, and Latina/o/x programs (especially to Sarah Pollack, Rafael de la Dehesa, Ismael García Colón, Álvaro Baquero Pecino, Oswaldo Zavala, Alyson Bardsley, and Matt Brim for running it all) for their collegiality and hard work in making our fields relevant to our students.

At Stanford University Press, series editors David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein and acquisitions editor Margo Irvin have backed this project and, along with Jessica Ling, seen to a smooth process. I am grateful for their commitment and prowess. My thanks also go to Mimi Braverman for excellent copy editing. The blind peer reviewers helped me put the book in better shape; I appreciated especially Reviewer 1 for taking the time to make detailed comments and provide constructive criticism. Shara Concepción, doctoral student and research assistant at the Graduate Center, helped revise part of the Works Cited list.

My one and only life companion, Robert Latham, has supported me intellectually and emotionally through the several incarnations of this book; for this patience and love and everything else that he has given me, I am immeasurably grateful and lucky. And of course, I am lucky for having all the other extraordinary people by my side. I thank all of you from the bottom of my heart: my devoted mother Beki Kandiyoti, whose multilingual verbal creativity inspires me every day and is the reason for my love of languages; and my far-flung, brilliant, and cherished sisters who move and inspire me—Sonia Bakar, Amila Buturović, Anita Gilodo, Aylin Gözübüyük, Shari Huhndorf, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Helen Lee, Arzu Öztürkmen, Kerri Sakamoto, Valentina Napolitano, Kathy Wazana, and Pınar Yılmaz. My special gratitude in critical times over the last few years to Kerri, for the utmost in sensitive loving care as well as her special stamp on this book; and to Anita, for always having the warmest home and being so supportive; and all my sisters, for their extra time, wisdom, and nurturing; Richard Fung, for my first garden, many first tastes, and deep generosity and hospitality; Gökbörü Sarp Tanyıldız and Selmin Kara for friendship and joyful, collective reading of Turkish literature; my supportive cousins Vanda Kandiyoti Şalom, Nedi Kohen, and Aliza Eluaşvili Kohen; my very dear, wise, and loving uncle and aunts Rıfat Kandiyoti, Jizel Kohen, and Deniz Kandiyoti; and my precious children and loves of my life, Alegra Kandiyoti and Shiran Kandiyoti, whose warmth and insight nourish me every day. You have each sustained me in many profound ways that would take another book to explain. Suffice it to say that you give the kind of meaning to my life without which nothing else can happen.

INTRODUCTION

LOST AND FOUND?

The Afterlives of Conversion

QUESTION: By the end of 2018, what did an incoming Democratic congresswoman from New York, a Republican Hispanic American, and an Evangelical Christian Zionist media figure have in common? The answer: All four claimed Sephardi roots reaching back to Iberian Jews who converted to Christianity in medieval times, settled in the Americas, and kept their forbidden former identities secret.

Although she received much attention for her December 2018 declaration of Jewish converso background, part of Puerto Rico’s amalgam of African, indigenous, and Spanish origins, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not the first mostly Hispanic/Latinx-identified public figure in the Americas who has acknowledged Sephardi origins. Several years earlier, on the other side of the political spectrum, Linda Chavez, the Reagan-Bush era conservative with New Mexican roots who served in Republican administrations, had the results of her genetic ancestry testing revealed on Henry Louis Gates’s popular television show Finding Your Roots. Chavez even traveled to archives in Seville to confirm her converso heritage. And when the Christian Zionist media personality Laurie Cardoza-Moore criticized Ocasio-Cortez’s views on Israel in early 2019, she accused the congresswoman of betraying their common Sephardi roots and ties to Hispania. Coincidentally, a scientific study gained international newspaper coverage shortly after Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks for its findings regarding Latin Americans’ DNA profiles, which match to a certain extent those of Turkish Sephardi Jews. This study, not the first of its kind, suggests that as much as 23% of Latin Americans could be of converso origin.¹

Whether the intentions are political, personal, or scientific, such public revelations are not obscure curiosities but part of a larger movement in the Latinx, Hispanic, Latin American, and Iberian worlds to assert previously submerged Jewish origins. These identifications, which have emerged more openly in the last few decades in the Americas and Iberia especially, have expanded further since the popularization of genetic ancestry testing and, more recently, since the 2015 Spanish and Portuguese laws granting citizenship to descendants of Sephardi Jews.

The largely forced conversions of Jews to Catholicism in fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal and the dispersal of their descendants in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Americas have been known, especially in the Jewish and Hispanic worlds, as phenomena of the distant past. However, especially since the 1980s and 1990s, we have witnessed a return of converso history to our present in media, literature, politics, scholarship, and testimonies. In variations of the more famous examples just noted, countless individuals have told tales of growing up in the Catholic Church and eventually discovering their ancestors’ secret or unknown Jewish identity and past. Although many people, like Ocasio-Cortez, only have affinity for the ancestry and do not profess current Jewish identity, others embrace the Judaism of their remote ancestors. Commonly, individuals shared their sense that their families had always been different. Some had practices strange to their (usually Catholic) larger milieu, such as Friday cleaning, mirror covering during mourning, or avoidance of pork.

The emergence as though from underground of such familial whispers and secrets and hidden residual Jewish practices has been narrated frequently as an uncanny survival of what has been presumed dead and buried. In addition to testimonials of individuals who disclosed such family confidences, revealed to them upon reaching adolescence or by accident, other striking stories also surfaced in the media. For example, a young woman who was drawn to Judaism hid her conversion because she deeply feared rejection, but once she was found out, older family members admitted Jewish heritage. Another convert to Judaism by personal choice inherited Jewish relics after her grandmother’s death. A woman in Barcelona was exhorted by her grandfather on his deathbed to return to a Judaism of which she had had no knowledge. Then there was the story of a legendary Puerto Rican musician who brokered a famous truce between rival New York City gangs in 1971. At around the same time, he discovered his Sephardi origins and spent his later years as a fervent Jewish believer. An Albuquerque Catholic priest who verified rumors about his ancestry through genetic testing continued to be a man of the Church, albeit one who sported a Star of David around his neck and openly acknowledged Jewish heritage.²

Less publicly but no less insistently, Brazilians, Colombians, Ecuadorans, Catalans, Spaniards, Portuguese, and many others in the Luso-Hispanic worlds of the Americas and Europe have reported suspecting and verifying Sephardi converso roots, despite the doubts of some scholars as to their veracity, as I explain later. Even without familial revelations or special practices, they have explained, they deduced their Jewish roots based on their family’s alienation from Catholicism, unusual surnames, or provenance from towns known to have had a significant Jewish or converso population, and sometimes, by just knowing it in their bones.

The scientific findings of genetic genealogy that have been reported by major publications have circulated further in blogs and social media and spurred new ancestral pursuits. Although for some individuals identity exploration through DNA testing is a hobby, albeit sometimes a meaningful and occasionally a life-changing one, hidden Sephardi heritage has also been presented as doubly charged for some Latinx in the United States, who were told, controversially, that they are carriers of the Jewish genetic mutation that causes breast and ovarian cancer (Wheelwright 2012).

A community that is not immediately identified with descent from Jewish converts to Christianity but in fact has some roots in that group is the dönme, also known as Sabbatean or Salonican descendants in Turkey. Some of the dönme have Spanish and Portuguese Jewish ancestors who converted to Christianity and returned to Judaism in the Ottoman Empire and subsequently became followers of the Ottoman rabbi Sabbatai Sevi in the seventeenth century. Sevi, the self-declared messiah who sought to transform Judaism, was known to have converted under duress to Islam, along with many of his adherents. The endogamous Ottoman dönme families who lived publicly as Muslims were often known to the larger society and attracted negative attention in different periods. Starting in the 1990s, roughly in the same years when media attention was directed to claimants of crypto-Jewish background in the Americas and Iberia, known families of Sabbatean descent in Turkey became the target of widespread stigmatization. A few chose open identification as Sabbateans or as having Jewish ancestry or both. Because some dönme, like many normative Sephardis, also had ancestors who were Christians for a time, those who have knowledge of the community bring together multiple conversions in telling their stories.

As a surviving emblem of the bitter end of convivencia (medieval Iberian coexistence of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures) in its various forms, the converso reappears when we are most concerned about endings, including of democracy and its fragile promises of conviviality (Gilroy 2004), and when we expand and transform our practices of return. In her important monograph Figurative Inquisitions, which is also one of the only lengthy treatments of conversos in contemporary Hispanophone and Lusophone literature, Erin Graff Zivin explains that "the Marrano subject matters to us—here, now—because it signals, from the beginning, the other side of reunification, nationalism, and colonialism, as well as the necessary failure of these modern political, religious, and identitary projects" (Graff Zivin 2014, 23). Our own return, in contemporary thought and literature, to the conversos as illustrations of the impossibility and dangers of unitary and authentic identities is accompanied, as I show in this book, by questions about returns of the conversos or, rather, their descendants.

Widespread interest in converso pasts, speaks in part to a particular need today for stories of survival under repression. We want to know about hidden transcripts (Scott 1990) and survivals that have been submerged but are imbued with a spirit of resistance to hegemonic powers. Built in is also a curiosity about how survival might have taken place: Given our heightened awareness of surveillance and control, evasion and circumvention as modes of resistance capture the imagination and are inscribed in texts about conversos as figures who built lives, identities, and communities by hiding, mixing, masquerading, and moving.

Iberian forced conversions and the Inquisition have been treated in modern literature at least since the nineteenth century, but the past few decades have seen an unprecedented number and array of fictional texts and testimonials on both sides of the Atlantic. These works are written in many languages by authors whose own origins may be close to or at a distance from this history. The return of this past and its reverberations in many cultures and bodies of writing teach us that the converso narrative is located not only in Jewish memory and historical consciousness but also elsewhere, including in unexpected contexts. As several key scholars have pointed out, Sephardi history, like the Holocaust (Rothberg 2009), may appear in the multiple literatures that are not considered Jewish per se, whether Caribbean (Casteel 2016), Latin American (Graff Zivin 2014; Halevi-Wise 2012a), or Iberian (e.g., Linhard 2014). Although crypto-Jewishness has sparked the imagination of literary writers on several continents and descendants of conversos have made identity claims in the Americas and Iberia, leaving their mark on local and global histories and cultures, the multifaceted resurgence of conversion stories has not been studied sufficiently as a literary and cultural phenomenon. Yet it merits attention for what it reveals about the afterlives of past events, the cultural politics of history, and contemporary world narrative.

Although conversion has been a chosen or forced tool of conformity to past and current dominant ideological agendas and modern biopolitics, it also can be widely unsettling. In her important study of colonial conversions, Gauri Viswanathan observes that conversion, individual or mass, interior or public, poses a severe challenge to the demarcation of identities set by the laws that govern everyday life and practice (1998, 75). Similarly, for Ira Katznelson and Miri Rubin, conversion is a radical deed entailing movements in social status and to new institutions as well as interior states of mind . . . and new options for economic and political standing. Conversion can be ‘riddled with pain’ and disruptive as it occasions separations from people and places" (2014, 3).

Revivals of ancient identities born of conversions are no less demanding and disruptive in word or deed. Nor can they be bracketed off from contemporaneous transnational political and social exigencies, even when they seem to be individual or narrowly localized choices based on distant pasts. The texts I have chosen to examine eschew bounded and regressive versions of returns and remnants; indeed, their representations of the converso condition challenge precisely the kind of interpellation of historicized collective identity that produces new certainties and boundaries.

In The Converso’s Return I examine literary fiction and memoirs that show how remote histories can animate contemporary identities and cultural politics. Recent literary narratives about the migrations of secret Jews to the Americas and the Ottoman Empire—such as the Latinx American, French, Spanish, and Turkish novels and autobiographical texts by Achy Obejas, Kathleen Alcalá, José Manuel Fajardo, Doreen Carvajal, Edgar Morin, Victor Perera, Elif Shafak, and Yeshim Ternar—not only represent converso history but also enable new reflections on the wider issues of genealogy, history, memory, and archives. These works raise questions that preoccupy communities with traumatic histories of genocide, slavery, forced conversion, and expulsion: How does one recuperate a past that has little documentation and extant evidence besides what was generated by the perpetrators, in which victims’ perspectives and experiences are erased?

Conversos left an imprint on early modern Spanish literature, and those who returned to Judaism outside Iberia after the fifteenth century, in the early modern period, left behind a wealth of writing several generations after 1492. But little remains about how ordinary converso descendants, especially the crypto-Jews with secret identities or practices, conducted their lives in the Americas, and still less remains anywhere of this legacy of secrecy after the early modern era. Contemporary literary texts inflected by distant and suppressed histories, such as the novels and memoirs about converso descent in this book, tell stories about what we know and what we do not know about the past or its remnants. Thus they not only expand the themes and plots of the narrative universe but also offer a sense of what this history and its unknowns mean today and reflect on the ways in which conversos entered contemporary discourse.

My analysis shows how the missing archives of the past are presented in narrative. First, in complex ways, literary writing imagines what is unknown but might have been (Ricoeur 1988) and calls attention to the narrative and political conditions of disappearance and secrecy of origins, underlining the reasons for the absence of archives. Moreover, despite the loss of records and erasures of experiences, both fiction and memoirs notably and insistently point to remnants, whether in written texts (books and files), oral traditions (e.g., family lore or gossip), or what we can think of as the embodied archive (e.g., the revelations of genetic ancestry testing). At times, this means not only finding extant traces to write about but also involving what I refer to as the production of remnants. By production I do not mean to evoke a falsification. Rather, I aim to characterize the particular processes of authors’ autobiographical or fictional narrations about the recovery of ancient converso or crypto-Jewish identities. These processes require following historiographic, familial, religious, genealogical, and genetic trails and involve a deliberate assertion of survival contra disappearance. Production also evokes the selection that may be involved in all genealogy: Some ancestors hold more weight than others, and descendants might engage in an active process of choice—they clip some roots and stretch and prune others (Zerubavel 2012)—if the right social conditions permit it. New or preexisting affiliations (such as with Jewishness) and emotions and political ideas about large-scale traumatic events become intertwined with filiation and perceptions of descent.

The idea that collective traumas cannot be contained in the past but remain with us, leaking into our present secretly or invisibly, affecting our chemistry, and sometimes rearing their heads unexpectedly, has been popularized through therapeutic and historical discourses. The narrative by or about someone who feels strongly that at some point they had a secretly Jewish ancestor of Iberian descent can reveal how the quest for the past can be both productive and problematic. The desire to recuperate buried histories can essentialize identities by reaching back to supposedly authentic and fixed definitions, including those interpretations in which certain looks, behaviors, talents, and choices are marked as Jewish and serve as evidence. At the same time, such personal and imaginative narratives can assert what the hegemonic religious, political, and economic powers have long suppressed. And, as Viswanathan (1998) argues, they can effectively destabilize essentializing categories, such as uninterrupted religious (e.g., Catholic or Jewish) or national identities. Reinstatements can also open doors to thinking in terms of convergences, such as the circulations, overlaps, and crossings of convert, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and indigenous histories throughout the Atlantic that are the subjects of the novels and memoirs in this book. But partitions also emerge. For example, the relinquishing or valorization of one affiliation over another, truer one can congeal autarchic identitarianisms, despite the warning that history is necessary not to restore but to dispel the chimeras of the origin (Foucault 2013, 80). In the fictional and nonfictional texts that are the subject of The Converso’s Return, we find reflection on both tendencies, though convergences are foregrounded.

Contemporary discourses about crypto-Jews and crypto-Jewishness include not only historical and genealogical reconstructions of Sepharad (Hebrew for Spain) and plausible converso worlds but also ideas about the metaphorical or representative status of this history. As we will see in the coming chapters, the crypto-Jewish condition is presented as a past phenomenon that anticipates and is instructive for the present; it prefigures the internally divided modern subjectivity or modernity’s compulsion toward assimilation. Jacques Derrida suggested that we

figuratively call Marrano anyone who remains faithful to a secret that he has not chosen, in the very place, where he lives, in the home of the inhabitant or of the occupant, in the home of the first or of the second arrivant, in the very place where he stays without saying not but without identifying himself as belonging to. . . . This secret keeps the Marrano even before the Marrano keeps it. (Derrida 1993, 81)

This figurative approach to the crypto-Jewish condition is shared by many critics. As Erin Graff Zivin observes, "Derrida is interested in not so much identifying historical instances of cultural marranismo—which he declares to be ‘finished’ (Aporias, 74)—but rather in the Marrano as metonym and of the right to secrecy (Graff Zivin 2014, 20). In the complementary views of Argentine critic Ricardo Forster, The Marrano represents the alter ego of the modern subject [and] exposes the impossibility of the modern Cartesian subject’s claim to wholeness, rationality, and autonomy" (quoted in Graff Zivin 2014, 23). Indeed, for Forster, the marrano is a fiction whose origins are unavailable, because there is no