Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Magic in a Square Pad of 400 Year Old Papers: Luis de Carvajal's manuscripts up close



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.