The Marrano Way

Between Betrayal and Innovation

Agata Bielik-Robson, Agata Bielik-Robson

• Éditeur: De Gruyter
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110768343
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Historia
• Sous-sujet: Historia judía

The Marrano phenomenon is a still unexplored element of Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution and – precisely as such – prefigures the advent of the typically modern "free-oscillating" subjectivity. Yet, the aim of the book is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos ), who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism "undercover." The book rather applies the "Marrano metaphor" to explore the fruitful area of mixture and cross-over which allowed modern thinkers, writers and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication – without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness which they subsequently developed as a "hidden tradition." The book poses and then attempts to prove the "Marrano hypothesis, " according to which modern subjectivity derives, to paraphrase Cohen, "out of the sources of the hidden Judaism": modernity begins not with the Cartesian abstract ego, but with the rich self-reflexive self of Michel de Montaigne who wrestled with his own marranismo in a manner that soon became paradigmatic to other Jewish thinkers entering the scene of Western modernity, from Spinoza to Derrida. The essays in the volume offer thus a new view of a "Marrano modernity, " which aims to radically transform our approach to the genesis of the modern subject and shed a new light on its secret religious life as surviving the process of secularization, although merely in the form of secret traces.

Part 1: Marrano Judaism

The Wandering Jew: The Anarchic Challenge of a Marrano Legend

Libera Pisano

The legend of the wandering Jew – in its second version as Ahasuerus – is a paradigmatic case which allows us to show how the fictional representation of otherness develops a peculiar conception of order in terms of the regulation of space, which is already contained in the double meaning of the word ‘errans.’ This paper is structured into three main parts: the first is an introduction to the notion of wandering; the second part examines the legend of the wandering Jew by shedding light on the historical context in which it arose, namely the city of Hamburg at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the tensions provoked by the arriving of Sephardic Jews from Portugal; finally, the third part attempts to analyse wandering as a Marrano paradigm for a philosophy of migration which calls into question the correspondence between man, identity and state. In order to do this, I will follow Gustav Landauer’s anarchic interpretation of Galut.¹

1 For Mortals, nothing is Worse than Wandering

The word ‘errans’ has a double meaning in many languages: ‘errare’, ‘irren’, ‘errar’; on the one hand it means the activity of wandering, on the other hand making a mistake. Meandering and failure are connected to the spatial metaphor of losing the right path and of heading down the wrong way. While the foreigner is identified as such through his or her place of origin and/or language, the wanderer is the exception who does not fit any category and who, through his or her heterotopias, represents a challenge to the assumptions, rules, and behaviors of the community. Therefore, wandering deals with a complicated tension between identities and otherness, stability and migration, the right path and the wrong way.

But why is wandering a curse? Who wanders? What did wandering symbolize in the past? Even in the Odyssey, there is a clear statement about the conception of wandering in ancient Greek culture: “For mortals, nothing is worse than wandering”² (15.343). Starting from the so called “Neolithic Revolution” mankind has searched for defined settlements that might be seen as a premise for social identity.³ However, these first settlements required the creation of particular borders in order to delimit an area and to create a territory;⁴ therefore, these first borders – fences, corrals, palisades and so on – are performative; indeed, the practice of bordering creates a community, since it also requires a massive effort on the part of the whole group.⁵ While, on the one hand, geographical boundaries acquired a political meaning, which dislocated wandering at the edges of civilization, on the other hand migrations of people – due to political, poverty, curiosity and so on – were tolerated across the centuries just as a temporary condition and not as a permanent status.

The notion of wandering could be interpreted as a synonym of the Diaspora. This term comes from the ancient Greek verb “diasperein” composed by “dia” – “about, across” – and “speirein” – “to scatter”. This word was used in the Septuagint Deuteronomy (XXVIII 25) to translate the Hebrew word “galut” which means exile.⁶ The translation from Hebrew to Greek – and translation is always a form a betrayal – describes the situation of the Jews with a new technical term that is a kind of synthesis between several different Hebrew words.⁷ Nowadays a broad use is made of the term ‘diaspora’ (for Armenians, Africans and so on). It is widely used in the field of post-colonial studies, since it produces a peculiar narrative.⁸ Having a homeland or experiencing a trauma are not a sufficient condition for the existence of diaspora.⁹ With Daniel Boyarin, we can state that a diaspora is “a particular kind of cultural hybridity and […] a mode of analysis rather than an essential thing.”¹⁰

Jewish Wandering as a Permanent Heterotopia

A largely discussed topic of contemporary philosophy concerns the huge difference between two forms of wandering, between Ulysses and Abraham, the Western tradition and the Jewish one. As Emmanuel Levinas – among other philosophers – stated: “To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we wish to oppose the story of Abraham who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land, and forbids his servant to even bring back his son to the point of departure.”¹¹ From a philosophical perspective the exile of Ulysses was temporary, a kind of Hegelian antithesis to be removed, while Jewish wandering is a permanent condition that denies a positive synthesis and readmits the impossibility of a coincidence of self with self. The archetypical nomadism of the wandering Jew can be seen as a marker of the human condition.

Why is Jewish wandering so problematic? The wanderer, the other, the alien cannot submit to this geographical determination and is thus perceived as a dangerous challenge to the established power: his uncontrollable heterotopia calls into question a political-geographical form of control and justice. Wandering belongs to Jewish history, culture, religion and thought; in fact, there is a kind of geographical topology of migration and a specific symbology of wandering.¹² The history of the Jewish people begins with the command of God to leave the land and from the beginning they are deprived of it (Genesis 12, 1–5). Not only must Abraham be a nomad, a foreigner, gher, but also his descendants will be foreigners in a land not of their own.¹³

Through the wandering of the whole people of Israel, being Jewish calls into question the political meaning of geographical boundaries and, furthermore, Jewish thought and culture can articulate – through wandering – a radical philosophy of migration that questions the idea of belonging to a state and to a language.¹⁴ The peculiarity of this condition turns the Jew into an agent of deconstruction of national borders and by shedding light on a more complex relationship between the earth and man – adama and adam – it develops a peculiar Wohnphilosophie.

Diaspora is an “endless translation of homeland,”¹⁵ where migration is a normal condition compared to the sedentary impulse of the nation-state, which has to define his boundaries to exercise control. As Heinrich Heine stated, Jewish people is ‘Volk des Geistes’ which is incompatible with the earthly character of states.¹⁶ It is a spiritual bond deeper than any material definition of the space. Therefore, the idea of Heimat as laid out in the book – according to Heine, the Torah is the “portatives Vaterland” [portable fatherland]¹⁷– cannot be interpreted as the substratum of a territorial fatherland, but only as a kind of Aufhebung of physical and political borders. In such a way, the bonds between man and land or Heimat can be called into question. In fact, this Diasporic thought might be helpful to distinguish the two kinds of homeland. The first is the fatherland, which means Heimat as Boden, ground and foundation, as the original place and the native land where everything is familiar and there is no room for the stranger – from this perspective, Heimat is close to the origin and exile acquires all the negative connotations of expatriation. The second homeland is more abstract, it is a fragile Heimat which deals with hybridity, books, language, cultural legacy, and “a philological home.”¹⁸

Jewish exile is first of all a linguistic exile, which calls into question the role of a mother tongue. As Franz Rosenzweig stated, the Jew is the eternal wanderer among different languages and the permanent guest in the words of the other; even if he speaks the host’s language perfectly, he will never be at home.¹⁹

Ahasuerus: The Legend of the Wandering Jew and the City of Hamburg

The wanderer, the other, the alien cannot submit to this geographical determination and is thus perceived as a dangerous challenge to the established power:. Such is precisely the case of Ahasuerus. The figure of the wandering Jew is an ambivalent character, fictional as well as dangerous. It is not by chance that the legend of the wandering Jew – in its second version – arises in modernity and coincides with the birth of the nation-state. On the one hand, he is a shadowy figure that embodies the prejudices of guilt and represents a risk for the community; on the other hand, he personifies the notion of otherness against which societies establish their identity categories. It should not be surprising that this legend, within a few decades of its first appearance in 1602, spread all over Europe at a difficult time of religious wars.

There exist two versions of this legend, which were sometimes combined. The medieval version appeared in Europe for the first time in a Latin chronicle. It tells of some pilgrims who arrived in Italy in 1223 and related that in Armenia they had met a man who had witnessed the suffering of Jesus. He was Pilatus’ doorkeeper Cartaphilus or Buttadeus, who had struck Jesus on the neck pronouncing these words: “Go, Jesus, why do you tarry?” Jesus had replied: “I will go, but you shall wait until I will come again!”. After Jesus’ death, Cartaphilus had been baptized and changed his name to Joseph, a man of few words who is supposed to lead a peaceful life in Armenia until the Last Judgment.

While the first version was not a popular legend, the German pamphlet of 1602 – Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzählung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasverus²⁰ – marked a watershed, insofar as it turned the legend of the wandering Jew into a common source for European culture. In the Book of Ahasuerus – a short pamphlet of 8 pages – the author uses the pseudonym of Chrysostomus Dudulaeus Westphalus and mentions as his source the Bishop of Schleswig, i.e. Paul von Eitzen, whose name is connected to Martin Luther because he had been his fellow student at the peak of his anti-Semitic stage.²¹

In this pamphlet the author relates that, in 1542, when Paul von Eitzen was a student on holiday in Hamburg, during a sermon in the church he perceived a strange man called Ahasuerus – a name borrowed from the book of Esther and employed at the Purim festivals held in medieval and early modern Germany. This was a barefoot shoemaker born in Jerusalem, a tall man with a long beard, dressed in black. He had been present when Jesus, on his way to Golgotha, had leaned against his house, but he had driven him away with rough words. Jesus had reacted by addressing him with the words: “I shall stand here and rest, but you shall wander forth and be everlastingly restless.” Since then Ahasuerus roams the world. In both versions of the legend, the medieval and the modern one, longevity appears as a curse, but the heathen Cartaphilus has become the Jew Ahasuerus and while the ...