This morning I had the pleasure of
meeting a long lost friend. The curators at the New York Historical Society
took the manuscripts of Luis de Carvajal, the 16th century crypto-Jewish
mystic, communal leader and martyr who is one of the main figures in my Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic: Blood
and Faith, out of their glass case and allowed me to look at their fragile
pages. I have worked on Luis and his family’s story working from transcripts of
his writings and Inquisitorial records for the past 15 years. I and all of the
scholars who have investigated this sensational case of crypto-Jewish activity
in the heart of colonial Mexico have relied on the transcription of Luis’
autobiography made by Alfonso Toro, a historian of the colonial period with a
penchant for picking fights with his contemporaries and of peppering his history
of a famed crypto-Jewish network with stereo-typical anti-Semitic jabs, “the
greedy Jews, fanatical Jews, like others of his race, etc.” However, I am
forever indebted to Toro, despite these atavistic bursts against “my race”, for
making his transcription of the autobiography because in 1932 under mysterious
circumstances it was stolen from the Mexican National Archive along with other
precious documents from Carvajal’s Inquisitorial file, many in his own hand. If
not for Toro I and those who came before me would not have had a copy of his
unique piece of spiritual self-fashioning. Two years back the manuscripts
appeared for sale by one of New York’s premier auction houses. Leonard Milberg,
a collector of early Americana, Judaica and Irish poetry sensed that something
was not right. He investigated the matter and realized that these were long
lost and stolen manuscripts. The FBI and the government of Mexico got involved
and in gratitude to Mr. Milberg the Carvajal
papers are on display till March 12 as part of THE FIRST JEWISH AMERICANS:
FREEDOM AND CULTURE IN THE NEW WORLD (http://www.nyhistory.org/
). I have previously written about this exhibit (http://sephardiphilia.blogspot.com/
) and I am currently working on a full review of its rich and varied portrait
of Jewish life in the Americas much of which is based on Mr. Milberg’s personal
collection. (I highly recommend making your way to the show before it closes!) After
many years living with this text, analyzing, contextualizing it, turning it
around in my head, it was a real thrill to sit with it, up close. The staff at the New York Historical Society, the director Louise Mirrer, Debra Bach, Michael Ryan and Alan Balicki were so gracious and helpful. I sincerely thank them for making these texts accessible and for welcoming me.
I felt I was sitting with a small magical object. It was waiting
to enchant me. The small bundle of manuscripts were inviting me into their neat
lines of tiny script. The first section was like meeting an old friend, or
seeing the face of a far away pen pal. I knew the lines of Carvajal’s
autobiography inside and out but I never saw them in his own hand, nor did I
know about the small side notes and elegant arrangement of the heading- the
dedication to the Lord of Hosts that announces the beginning of his tale- and
the way he arranged the last lines in a final triangular flourish. Those
details point to the fact that it was a text he went back to and added and
revised. It also tells me that he really thought that he was about to escape
the shadow of his persecution and that his story of trials and tribulations was
wrapping up.
But then I encountered works I
never knew of: "MODO DE llamar a Dios y exercicio devotisimo de oración" a guide to prayer for himself and for his
fellow Mexican secret Jews. A list of the acts of mercy that the “most high God
performed for Joseph”-a review of the major events of his short and tumultuous
life (pages 39-40). Right before this list which takes up two pages I found a
section with the ten commandments in Latin written out in large print letters
with gold leaf- it is beautiful! I knew he was an expert calligrapher but where
would he have access to the materials and knowledge of the technique apply the
goldleaf?
There is another page towards the
end (back of page 44- the second half of the work had page numbers; it was
unclear if they were a later addition or not.) with a list of Jewish holidays and
their corresponding Christian dates, another column featured the name of the Hebrew months and then on the
bottom right hand corner there was a list of the Hebrew numbers from 1-10
transliterated “Ehad, Senahim etc.” A Hebrew primer for a fully Latinaized Jew?
A Jew who is completely dependent on the Latin he learned in a Jesuit school in
Medina del Campo for his exploration of religious texts and his mining and
transposing of Jewish content in those works of medieval scholasticism. What
follows are harder to decipher texts in Portuguese and Latin- some psalms in
Latin and some prayers in Portuguese along with some deeply cryptic lists that
seem to be some sort of mystical codes awaiting to be deciphered.
I am excited to look at these pages
with greater care in the near future. In particular I want to see if his guide
to prayer tells us anything new about his religious mentality or the wider
religious circles he was a part of. How was he refashioning new spiritual
trends into his own practice? Do the passages in Portuguese, perhaps, belong to
a different hand and might they be examples of Jewish material that some
converso with experience in the “Lands of liberty” wrote down, translating from
the Hebrew original into romance (Spanish or Portuguese)? We know of several such cases and Luis himself
thanks certain Italian Jews who passed through Mexico in search of financial
gain and shared their knowledge with the secret Jews of New Spain. I am excited to ask more questions of these
beguiling records of a vibrant and short lived religious life.
Luis de Carvajal concludes his Spiritual Autobiography by praising God and expressing confidence that he was about to leave for the lands of liberty.
