Through Cracks in the Wall

Presenting a broad canvas, Lúcia Helena Costigan focuses on a series of Brazilian letrados, that is, elite members of a stigmatized minority, descendents of Jews, still branded as New Christians even generations after conversion to Catholicism. Costigan examines the lives and careers of Luis de Carvajal (d. 1599), Bento Teixeira (ca. 1561–1600), Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão (1557–1618), Manuel Beckman (1630–85), and playwright Antonio da Silva (1705–39), each arrested by the Inquisition. Some of these figures are well known to specialists, some were well known to their contemporaries; some wrote and philosophized before coming into contact with the Inquisition, some wrote and philosophized largely because of that contact. Other than Brandão, who was miraculously acquitted, each man was burned at the stake as an unrepentant “Judaizer.” One of Costigan’s main goals is to increase the attention given in Latin American and Atlantic world studies to the Portuguese New Christian diaspora, whose experiences and writings she seeks to recuperate as central to the narrative of the Iberian Atlantic. Anti-Jewish persecution on the peninsula dispersed Jews and their converted descendants throughout the Iberian empires, causing the establishment or strengthening of numerous crypto-Jewish communities at far-flung frontiers. The tortured biographies of men such as those above comprise one result, then, of a very Iberian story.With learned and sensitive readings, Costigan unpacks the autobiographical writings and Inquisition trial records of these accused Judaizers for documentation of their shifting perspectives, practices, stances, their independence, skepticism, and resistance, both before and during their trials. With great sympathy, she reads New Christian letrado discourse as being particularly concerned with social justice. Even in jail these men “acted as leaders who questioned and defied the cruelties of the Inquisition and the arbitrary rules of their societies” (p. 201). The Inquisition is treated as a highly political institution, serving directly and indirectly a host of regressive and repressive macro- and micro-forces. Costigan blames the Portuguese Inquisition and its excesses and cruelties on Philip II and Spanish pressures. This is not a general survey of New Christian letrado culture in “the making of ” the Atlantic world but a theopolitical homage based on a selective martyrology of a few extreme Judaizing loyalists who dared resist Iberian thought control.Costigan shows how Carvajal constructs and presents his Jewish self in his texts, wielding Baroque aesthetic methodologies, moral values, and theological categories in order to claim them for a kind of converso counterdiscourse. The Brazilian New Christian Bento Teixeira’s epic poem Prosopopéia, which critiques King Philip II from an often self-conscious stance as minority discourse, mimics Camões’s famous epic Os Lusíadas “as an exercise aimed at deconstructing Camões’s text, and as a strategy for inclusion of the Jewish and New Christian experience within the Iberian epic tradition” (p. 81). Not only does Teixeira not “defend ultramarine expansion as a messianic mission reserved for Christians of Portugal and Spain,” but he produced “a poetic, messianic, and religious work that assigns a central role to the descendents of Sephardic Jews in the imperial expansion to the West” (p. 122). Fernandes Brandão is seen as an early exemplar of criollo consciousness, strongly attached to the New World and proffering “socially advanced” ideas. His Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil nowhere mentions Christ nor extols the conversion of native souls made possible by colonization, and Costigan wonders whether the descriptions of the colony’s fruitfulness and other hints may have been coded ways of telling crypto-Jews that they could thrive in this American promised land (which lacked an Inquisition). Antonio José da Silva’s plays “unveiled the weaknesses of those in power and denounced the evils of Portuguese society . . . the spirit of intolerance and persecution” (p. 197). Costigan speculates that da Silva may have served as a scapegoat for other forward-looking estrangeirados and suspects that da Silva’s social criticism aroused the wrath of the king, who used the Inquisition to get at him using the charge of Judaizing.Costigan’s skills and ambitions would be better served by foregrounding her arguments in a clearer exposition that meanders less. Her book makes a fruitful complement to Miriam Bodian’s Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World (Indiana University Press, 2007), from which Costigan would have benefited much. Costigan would also strengthen her analysis by considering already existing studies of converso literary discourse by scholars such as Gregory B. Kaplan or Colbert Nepaul singh, among others.Given the ambitious scope of Costigan’s treatment, it is not hard to find things with which to quibble or disagree. The favorable Sephardic/converso image of Italy could not be due to the fact that “Venice and the northern part of [Italy] was under the Ottoman Empire” (p. 49, n. 19), since such was never the case (perhaps this is a typo, or Costigan refers to Ottoman economic domination). Allusions to “collective sufferings and resistance” in Teixeira’s Prosopopéia are not enough to make the verses “a manifestation of the Lurianic Kabala movement.” It is not enough to point to different phenomena; Costigan needs to show just how they relate or compare (p. 117). She asserts that Brandão supported the interests of the settlers in Brazil, “particularly those of Jewish heritage,” though she has not shown any evidence of the latter (p. 143). Similarly overenergetic is her leap from the fact that “priests and friars from different denominations appeared in front of the inquisitors to testify in defense of ” da Silva to the generalization that this proves “that many members of the Church were not in favor of the Inquisition’s actions with respect to New Christians” (p. 175).Typographic, grammatical, and stylistic errors are unfortunately overly numerous. The author’s excellent but foreign English has not been improved where necessary. In one recurring example, the Portuguese processo is rendered as “process” rather than the obviously correct “trial.” Some works cited by the author never appear in the bibliography. Such flaws as these detract from a work brimming with insights and helpful perspectives

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Diaspora · Independence (probability theory) · Judaism · Literature · Narrative · Persecution · Political science · Portuguese · Skepticism · Theology · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Sephardic Jews and Inquisition Studies

• Repositioning the Dutch in the Atlantic, 1680–1800

  Open Access•Gert Oostindie, Jessica Vance Roitman•Itinerario•2012

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