Norman Simms

 

A Preference for Horses

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
and Luis de Carvajal el Mozo’s Autobiography

 

Sept.19, 2005

Near the end of his Autobiography, penned during and immediately following his first imprisonment by the Inquisition in Mexico on charges of judaizing, Luis de Carvajal el Mozo, writes about himself, under the code-name of Joseph Lumbroso (the Enlightened One):

Whenever Joseph came to a monastery, he was provided with lodging and offered food; but ever mindful of the Law and commandment of his Lord God, he refused the food to avoid defiling himself, saying that he had already eaten. It often happened, when he left the company and board of those men whom he loathed, that he went to eat his bread among the beasts, thinking it better to eat among horses in cleanliness than in uncleanliness at the tables of his well-bred enemies.[i]

Before analyzing this paragraph closely and glossing its Jewish and Crypto-Jewish references, we should note its strange likeness to a passage in Book IV of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

      In Chapter XI of the Fourth Voyage, Lemuel Gulliver meets his wife for the first time since his return to England and he finds, when she greets him with a kiss, that “having not been used to the touch of that odious animal for so many years, I fell in a swoon for almost an hour.”[ii] He then goes on to explain the situation he finds himself in:

…during the first year I could not endure my wife or children in my presence, the very smell of them was intolerable, much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room. To this hour they dare not presume to touch my bread, or drink out of the same cup, neither was I ever able to let one of them take me by the hand. The first money I laid out was to buy two young stone-horses, which I keep in a good stable, and next to them the groom is my greatest favourite; for I feel my spirits revived by their smell he contracts from the stable. My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them, at least four hours every day. They are strangers to the bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me, and friendship to each other.[iii]

The points of contact between this passage from an early eighteenth-century English satire and the late sixteenth-century Crypto-Jewish autobiography are striking and puzzling. First of all, Gulliver expresses a sense of intense physical and psychological disgust for his wife, the physical aspect most strongly evident in the “odiousness” of her touch and taste, the psychological in his preference for horses as conversational partners. Second, Gulliver feels alienated from the people, customs and scenes of normal European culture and takes his emotional and intellectual bearings not from the people and places he grew up amidst and which for long he loved and missed intently during his voyages to “remote nations of the world.” Instead, more than with his experiences among the Liliputians and the Brobdignanians, his time with the Houyhnhms and Yahoos has completely changed his perspective on the world and his own person.[iv] 

      In addition, when we examine this passage more closely and consider some of the contextual persons and events, it is possible to see that Swift as author is also treating this fourth return to England by Gulliver in a rather different light. These points of contact and difference will emerge from a closer examination of the text and textures of each passage just cited.

      Luis de Carvajal in his Autobiography writes of the time when he was released from the prison of the Holy Office because there was, so far, insufficient evidence to prove that he was a Crypto-Jew and he had strongly presented himself as a devout New Christian, a good Roman Catholic. In the section of the book we are now examining, we are told how, when he was trying to raise funds to pay the fine imposed on his family and himself in various monastic houses and where, at the same time, he was to receive instruction in the one and true faith of the Church, he was able to read books in the libraries used by monks. These books were not just the Vulgate translation of the Bible and a range of orthodox commentaries, but other volumes dealing with the problem of Iberian recent converts whose sincerity was always in doubt and whose Judaism was suspected as a heretical backsliding from their Catholicism. Carvajal says that he (that is, Joseph, to use the biblical name to identify himself as a Secret Jew) would not eat any of the food provided by the monks because he would not defile himself with their non-kosher meals. Obeying the laws of kashrut, insofar as he could understand them, he would only eat the bread he himself brought along. What he could know of these rabbinical ordinances would come, first, from his own reading of the Five Books of Moses, as well as, second, from the warning lists posted by Inquisitors in almost every church; these were a long series of indicators that New Christians themselves should be watchful over and that their neighbours and fellow parishioners should be vigilant of in those individuals and families known to be of converso stock—and therefore always tainted by impure Jewish blood. 

      Yet it is also possible, and perhaps likely, in a third sense, that Carvajal had come into contact with several members of the naçio, as the mostly Portuguese New Christians preferred to call themselves when they kept up contacts with one another, especially family and friends who had escaped the Lands of Idolatry in Iberia and now lived openly as Jews in France, Italy, the Netherlands or North Africa. Joseph/Luis’ own brother now lived in Italy as a practicing Jew, also with Lumbroso as his proudly-asserted “New Jewish” name. There were in addition several settlers who arrived in Mexico after living in Morocco or Livorno and who came to the Spanish colonies in the New World for business, family or spiritual reasons. 

      These last spiritual reasons could be, sometimes, quite deliberately to instruct Crypto-Jews in the rabbinical practices they had been cut off from after their conversion to Catholicism; but sometimes, too, in order to escape from what they experienced as the dead weight of those reconstituted Jewish communities where returned New Christians imposed a heavy burden of communal practice on each other—not always, it would seem, with full comprehension of the values inherent in rabbinical Judaism or with a peculiar bent towards mystical (kabbalistic) beliefs which were alien to anyone who maintained memories of more traditional rationalistic (maimonidean) Sephardic Judaism. 

      Carvajal the Younger speaks of his loathing of the monks he encountered in the monasteries, and he expresses a reverse sense of abhorrence of their uncleanness that matches the Iberian negative feelings about Jews and their foetus judaicus, their Jewish stink, as well as disgust as the supposed Hebrew deviousness, greed, and deception. Jews were, after all, in the eyes of the Christians the murderers of Christ, blind to His messianic message, and stiff-necked about recognizing the role of the Church as the New Israel triumphantly replacing the worn-out and sterile Synagoga. For Carvajal the alienation and disgust are so great that he not only wants to eat by himself but enjoys the company of the beasts out in the stable, particular the horses. It is in this last preference of horses to people that Carvajal’s Autobiography intersects most explicitly with Gulliver’s Travels. But the analogy may also be seen in his disgust at the odiousness of the monks and friars he has to come into contact with: he hates them because they represent the ecclesiastical establishment that has persecuted and tormented his mother, sisters, and other relatives and because their ideological uncleanness is matched by their visceral pollution. 

      Luis de Carvajal el Mozo began his autobiographical writings probably in 1591 and 1592 and concluded with events in 1594. The text was not published until more than three hundred years later, as it was kept in the Inquisitorial archives of Mexico, and so there is no way Jonathan Swift could ever have come across the document nor have heard of Luis de Carvajal and the rest of his family. Scholarship on Swift has not dealt in any way with connections to or knowledge of Jewish persons or history in his contemporary world. In particular, modern criticism of Gulliver’s Travels has increasingly focused on its relationship to the Irish Problem, in which Swift took an active interest, and to the questions surrounding colonial and imperial expansionism during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In fact, one of the most recent “casebook” editions of the satiric narrative stacks the deck of a post-modernist reading focused on Edward Said and other revisionist literary historians of these themes.[v] 

      Insofar as much of this Marxist and Post-Modernist critical writing has increasingly strong anti-Semitic biases, rather superficially disguised as anti-Zionism, it may not be out of line to focus for a few moments on the way Swift’s parody of a sailor’s travel journal appears when viewed through the optic of Jewish affairs in so-called Enlightenment Europe and the Iberian empires of the Indies. That within the discourses of the Enlightenment Judaism is viewed as symbolic of all that is pernicious and offensive about the superstition-filled “Dark Ages” may add a certain piquancy to this approach. This momentary shift in perspective, I wish to argue, can shed light on some places of Swiftian satire that have not been dealt adequately with and thereby suggest that the author was not completely unconcerned with the way in which Sephardic Jews confronted and helped to construct the modern world in response to persecution, expulsion, and massacre. They had been forced to convert in great numbers to a faith they had no real commitment to practicing and were also forced to leave their traditional communal institutions and cultural roots—and thus become a new kind of people in a new kind of world.

      We begin by examining more closely the passage cited from the last section of Gulliver’s fourth voyage to the Land of the Houyhnhms, the text cited above in which he expresses his disgust with human beings in general, his family in London in particular, and his preference for horses, even if they are, unlike the Houynhnms themselves, unable to speak or think rationally. 

Lemuel Gulliver Meets Pedro de Mendez

Just a few pages before the passage in which Gulliver indicates that he would rather be among horses than his own wife and children comes another which may also provide supporting evidence of Swift’s knowledge and understanding of the Sephardic crisis following the mass conversions of the early sixteenth century and the Expulsion of 1492. The suggestion has already been made by some recent critics that the Portuguese sea captain who rescues Gulliver from his escape from Houyhnhmland may have been meant to be taken as a Marrano [vi] As happens all too often, however, Clement Hawes confuses the terms he is using: he defines a Marrano as “a crypto-Jew who concealed his faith to escape religious persecution.”[vii] Even worse are the confusions in Maurice A. Géracht. For though he rightly latches on to the possibility that Mendes, as a Portuguese sea captain, could be a Marrano, he keeps abusing the term. Examining the background to a possible historical model for Swift’s character, Géracht writes: “Turn-of-the-[nineteenth-]century biographers states that Mendes [sic] Pinto was expelled because he was found to be a Marrano (to possess Jewish blood.”[viii] Because he seems to depend on secondary sources that are way out of date—from Lucien Wolf in 1902 through Cecil Roth in the 1930s and 1940s to R.D. Barnett in 1971 and John Carswell in 1973, he is out of touch with all the important work done in regard to Crypto-Jews and Marranos over the past two decades. He thus cites without question a sentence like this from a 1922 edition of Henry C. Lea’s History of the Inquisition in Spain: “The number of Portuguese Jews, Marranos, and ‘New Christians,” many of Spanish descent, was, relative to Portuguese Christians in New Spain, so large, and intermarriage had been so frequent ‘that foreigners generally regarded the Portuguese as all Jews.’”[ix] Historically and culturally, the best we can say of such a sentence is that it is a mess. 

   It needs to be pointed out that while there were mass conversions, forced and voluntary in Spain from 1390 through most of the next century, in Portugal there had been little if any pressure to take Jews to the baptism font; but in 1496, after many Jews had fled into Portugal to escape the Expulsion of 1492, political exigencies—an advantageous marriage of the king to the infanta of Castile which carried the condition of making Portugal Jew-free—all Jews were forced to convert. However, to keep his emergent middle-class commercial class intact, the Portuguese monarch promised there would be no Inquisition for at least a generation. It is in this population that most of the Crypto-Jews were created. And later, when not only a Portuguese version of the Inquisition was founded, but after the two Catholic kingdoms were merged, that many Portuguese New Christians crossed back into Spain or fled to Spanish overseas territories, since it was widely felt that the Holy Office in Lusophone lands was both more thorough in its tracking down of suspected judaizantes and more familiar with the phenomenon of Crypto-Judaism than their Spanish counterparts.

   Let me set out more precisely the terms which occasionally do overlap but which do need to be kept as separate as possible.

·                                 Jews, like Moors (Muslims) who converted to Catholicism were known as New Christians and conversos. In Spain and Portugal, these terms remained in place in regard to former Jews, not only for the individuals involved, but for families and for generations afterwards as an increasingly derogatory designation.

·                                 Sephardim is the ancient term for Jews settled in the Iberian Peninsula, from the Biblical term Sepharad for this part of Europe. By extension, after the dispersions from 1492 onwards, the term also refers to Jews settled in North Africa, the European littoral and islands of the Mediterranean, as well as in the Levant and Ottoman lands. Claiming a separate, more noble descent than their Ashkenazi co-religionists, the Sephardim carried with them the cultural pride and social haughtiness of Iberian hidalgos. They also c ontinued to speak Spanish and Portuguese, and to maintain, where possible, the Judaism of the “Golden Age” and conviviencia.

·                                 Rabbis understood those specific Jews who converted under duress as anousim, forced converts; but also, in the generations which followed the original baptism, children, grandchildren and further of men and women who voluntarily left their ancestral faith were also known as anousim because these individuals and families had no choice in who and what they were. Those who converted voluntarily or in later generations refused the opportunity to return to Judaism through escape were considered meshoulim, renegades and traitors.

·                                 Those New Christians whom the Inquisition accused, with or without proof, as living and believing in the “dead” Old Law, were known as judaizantes, a heretical status in the eyes of the Inquisition. 

·                                 New Christians were not only always suspected of insincerity in their conversion to Catholicism, but also became stigmatized with the genetic taint of impure blood, baptism being (contrary to canon law and tradition) incapable of creating limpieza de sangre, the pure blood of Old Christians. City, military, guild and religious organizations—not the Church as such nor the Crown itself—used the debility of impure blood to impose the same restrictions on converted Jews as had been in force against practicing Jews prior to 1390.

·                                 Conversos who made an attempt to live and believe as secret Jews, no matter how fragmented or misconstrued their attempt may have been, are known as Crypto-Jews. Not all Crypto-Jews were Marranos, however.

·                                 Marrano is the most pejorative way of describing these ambiguous people and it was used both by Catholics and by Jews to designate those individuals who chose not to escape from the Lands of Idolatry when it was possible, who did not seek to substitute a secret Judaism for their inner feelings and private devotions, even as they performed in public worship and participated in civic or military life as good Catholics. 

·                                 The Portuguese Nation is another way of describing all these groups and individuals, and it is therefore a term that we have to discuss in historical terms. 

      In response especially to the forced mass conversion of Jews in Portugal in 1496, an act which caught up not only the long-standing rabbinic communities in that nation but also the more than hundred thousand Castilian Jews who crossed the boarder four years earlier, it became common for the words Jew and Portuguese to become virtually interchangeable. This was true in those parts of Western Europe to which, when it was possible, these anousim or forced converts fled in order to return to Judaism, but also in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the crowns of Spain and Portugal were temporarily united, in Spain itself. Ironically, it seemed to many New Christians formerly from Spain that they stood a better chance of evading the Portuguese Inquisition in Spain, where the Holy Office had relaxed some of its persistence in tracking down Judaizers—something that occurred because within the first two generations most conversos had lost touch with Jewish beliefs and customs. So many suspicious people came to Madrid and other cities that it was generally assumed that any Portuguese individual or family was likely to be Crypto-Jewish. In addition, when escaping Sephardim returned to Judaism and joined the recently established Jewish communities in Italy, France, Holland and England, they too identified themselves as members of the naçio, that is, the Portuguese Nation. 

      By Swift’s time, at the turn of the eighteenth century, when Jews had been legally allowed to return to England and Ireland, he could have known of these groups—if not specific individuals—as Portuguese Jews or perhaps even as just Portuguese. “Given Swift’s political and social awareness of what was going on in London, as well as his family’s connection with Portuguese trade, it is likely,” according to Géracht, “that he was aware of that Jewish community, and of the habitual English response to it.”[x] But how aware was Swift of the nuances and subtleties in the words outlined above, and of the awkward, confused, and necessarily concealed feelings among the members of the naçio in London and Dublin? Géracht does not think they would have made much difference to the author of Gulliver’s Travels and the inventor of Pedro de Mendez. Swift and popular British prejudices would have only been, in this literary historian’s eyes, concerned with the anti-Semitic aspects, and so viewed all Jews, whatever degree of commitment to Judaism—or may we even say, to Catholicism—with contempt.[xi] Gèracht therefore takes as given the negative connotations associated with Pedro de Mendez as a likely secret—or former—Jew, and builds an interpretation of the passage in Book IV of Swift’s satire that uses Mendez in the same way the New Testament uses a Samaritan in the parable of the man lying in pain at the side of the road—a Jew neglected by his . fellow Jews. Despised because of their rejection of the Prophets as canonical Scripture and consequently unclean in regard to the Jews of the Second Temple period, the Samaritan’s show of charity does more than put to shame the self-righteous Levites and haughty Priests of Jesus’ time. So, too, the Portuguese skipper highlights the madness of Gulliver’s rejection of Europeans as filthy Yahoos and, by keeping the reader from identifying with the despised figure of Jewish blood, creates a satirical shock that stings with its tail: to recognize an essential Christian humanity in Pedro Mendez is to put in a new light the very easy assumption that one term makes the other possible.[xii] All turns, as Géracht implies, on the parabolic quality of the story of the Good Samaritan, and on the way it exemplifies—redefines—the Golden Rule. 

It is the impertinence of gentiles who identify with the Samaritan, and of modern readers who ascribe to Swift contemporary cosmopolitan views which eviscerate the parable and the satire. For the Samaritan Tale is a parable and not merely an “exemplary story” (an exemplary story would have been rhetorically better served had the victim been a Samaritan and the helper a simple Jew). The parable is not a comforting tale of a traveller who did his good deed; rather it damns social, racial, and religious superiority; and, most significantly, it is a new vision of the human condition. The focal point is not the good deed itself, but “the goodness of the Samaritan….The parable also forces upon the hearers, who identify with the man in the ditch, the question: who among you will permit himself or herself to be served by a Samaritan? Only those who cannot resist, who have nothing to lose, who are truly victims, truly disinherited.[xiii]

Gulliver, it would therefore seem, lacks of the grace of receiving with love the charity offered, and not only alienates himself still further from the human race and the civilization of Christian Europe, but from the special teaching of Christ in the parable—that he must be willing to lose himself in order to find himself, to loosen himself from the prejudices of his reason (the ideology of the Houhynmns) and embrace in himself and his family, as well as in the Portuguese sailors, the defining reality of being a Yahoo among Yahoos, that is, sharing in the Original Sin. Gulliver is blinded to the higher reason of Christianity by the reason of horses who have no soul.

Realism versus Parable and Moral Tales

Yet is this really what is going on? The striking similarity of Swift’s fictional text with the heart-felt confessions of Luis de Carvajal el Mozo perhaps shakes our faith in Géracht’s otherwise persuasive reading. What the colonial Mexican Crypto-Jew experienced should alert us to other details in the encounter between Lemuel Gulliver and Pedro de Mendez and point towards a more subtle and complex way of reading Swift’s text.

      Gulliver escapes from the land of the horses because he was warned by the Sorrel Nag that a vote was taken in the Houynhmn Council to destroy him as an untenable freak of nature, a talking Yahoo. The Englishman prepares for his departure by building a small canoe from baby Yahoo skins. His first meeting after nearly two weeks of sailing to the area of New Holland is on an island inhabited by wild savages—or so he claims these naked people to be. Gulliver’s proof is that he was shot on the inside of his left knee, although readers by now are well-enough aware of his prejudices and misprisions not to take his word at face value. That the natives sit around a fire in family groups puts them into a different category than the humanoid creatures he met in Houynhmnland, where they performed more like wild monkeys than human beings. Gulliver’s sudden appearance and running off, at the very least—since he may have done more to frighten or threaten these so-called savages—led to their chase and shooting arrows at the stranger. We are entitled, therefore, to question his story and his motives and to consider that a countertext of some sort, that is, an alternative construction of events, were all the facts and not just Gulliver’s provided, to explain what happened. The absence of that countertext, however, is strong enough evidence to force a holding in abeyance of any agreement with the madman’s account. A version of the story premised on the shared humanity of the naked “savages” and Gulliver would suggest that this encounter could have turned out differently had the Englishman made some attempt to treat with the others an equal.

      Nevertheless, having been endangered by these so-called savages whose existence seems to confirm Gulliver’s worst notions of the Yahoo race, he notes a boatload of European sailors and tries to hide from them. But these seamen track him down and then stare in astonishment at his strange appearance. His speech to them—both in what he says and how he speaks—further astonishes them. When he identifies these men as Portuguese mariners, Gulliver begins to express his wonder and disgust at them, still viewing the world of normality through the perspective he had adapted from that of his Houhyhnhm masters, all the while, as he says, trembling between “fear and hatred.” But if Gulliver cannot understand the nature of the reality he has been returned to and feels nothing but deep loathing for these “honest Portuguese” sailors, they, for their part, though regarding his as very bizarre indeed, show compassion and humanity. They never question his essential humanity. His reluctance to go with them makes them threaten to bring him to their captain by force. It is not because they have fear and hatred for him as an animal or monstrous other but because, believing him to be mad, they feel compassion and shared humanity, and so are compelled by their principles to save him from himself. This could be construed in Christian terms, but not necessarily so. 

      From José Faur we learn that the medieval concept of humanitas was constructed in such a way as to dissolve the individual into a corporationalism premised on the corpus Christi, the mystical and institutionalized Body of Christ.[xiv] Such a dissolution of the individual into the corporate body of the Church-State, as happened in Spain, particularly after the near-completition of the Reconquista in the course of the fifteenth century—and the premise too upon which the Inquisition was founded—was discipline, in other words, coercion and force. Ironically, as the Crown and Church became persecuting agencies, enforcing a homogeneity on the persons collected into the corpus Christi, the word humanitas became negative, not only embodying the carnal and therefore sinful matters in human experience, but the intrusive and polluting qualities of the non-Christian—and the hidden insincerities of the New Christians, that is, those whose tainted Jewish blood could not be washed away by baptism.[xv] Just as Jews who converted or were forced to conversion found the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church difficult to understand and accept, and ever more so when the Tridentine Reforms were imposed on the Catholic monarchies of Iberia, there was another, perhaps more fundamental obstacle blocking Jewish assimilation to the Christian mentality. This was the Jewish formation of individuality as the basic element in spiritual, moral and ethical behaviour. This humanity, rooted also in the carnal or somatic reality of the person whose body and soul were neither mutually exclusive nor in endless struggle with one another, was by definition shared with all nations and races. Judaism imposed on its individual members a regimen of disciplined behaviour, a code of law and custom, but also believed that all people were the children of one God and all nations, too, were coventantally obligated to live by the Noachic Code. If Jews and Crypto-Jews took part in the Iberian conquest of the New World and at times engaged in the slave trade, they did so without rationalizing their actions by dismissing conquered peoples from the human race and saw the master-slave relationship as an economic or contractual one, not a racial distinction. It was a common slur—or observation—on the part of colonial governors to note the intimacy between Jews and their slaves or with Indians, an intimacy that could be sexual and lead to marriage, or at least to a surprising sense of responsibility towards children produced in concubinage, even to the point where such offspring were sent to Europe to be brought up by portions of the family sufficiently safe to raise these children in a Jewish home. In other words, while class and national prejudices might persist, along with distrust of religions not one’s own, Jews and Crypto-Jews did not take the extreme positions evident in Spanish, Portuguese, or English overseas colonial adventures and extended to a satirical extreme in the person of Gulliver. The Portuguese sea captain seems at first to represent a Christian and European point of view that is idealized in its confrontation with Gulliver, but which, when examined more closely, also represents a position that is not comfortably set up as Christian and not clearly focused as European. It is certainly off-putting in a rhetorical way to find the tolerance and humanity absent in the ordinary Englishman—Gulliver—present in a Roman Catholic and a Portuguese. Pedro de Mendez seems to incorporate within himself the virtues that Swift would use as a measure against English foibles and faults, and which, in other sections of The Adventures, Gulliver claims for himself and his nation in contrast to the strange and wonderful people he meets. A deeper tension, however, obtains once another context hoves into view.

      This interface between two such dissimilar perspectives on the world as that of the humane and tolerant Portuguese skipper and the outrageous English convert to horse-values continues when Gulliver is brought into the cabin of the captain, Pedro de Mendez. “[H]e was a very courteous and generous person.” Patient and gentle, the Portuguese officer tries to eke out of Gulliver, who describes himself in these circumstances as “silent and sullen,”[xvi] some information which would explain his bizarre behaviour. Gulliver also reports that he was chained like a madman, and indeed imputes to the Portuguese the sense that “it were a dream or a vision.” But the more Gulliver speaks, the more Pedro de Mendez begins to see some truthfulness in what the strange Englishman is trying to say:

The captain, a wise man, after many endeavours to catch me tripping in some part of my story, at last began to have a better opinion of my veracity, and the rather because he confessed, he met with a Dutch skipper, who pretended to have landed with five others of his crew upon a certain island or continent south of New-Holland, where they went for fresh water, and observed a horse driving before him several animals exactly resembling those described under the name of yahoos, with some other particulars, which the captain said he forgot; because he then concluded them all to be lies.

Unlike the other sceptical Dutch skipper, Pedro can see beyond the improbability of Gulliver’s tale, not just because he can now add this second witness to the original account, but because he has the humanity to see beyond the Englishman’s apparent mad ravings. If this is so, then perhaps we can take this humanity itself—this capacity to hold back from outright rejection of reports that stretch the limits of common sense—precisely because he is a New Christian and perhaps a Crypto-Jew. One of the key identifying marks of converso mentality, according to José Faur, is this openness to the other of the New Worlds discovered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[xvii] Like Fray Bartolomeo de las Casas in his defence of the rights of Indians, Pedro de Mendez allows for all kinds of new members of the human race to be seen as children of one Father. According to Real and Vienken, in a more general sense, Portuguese mariners “were already noted for their ‘humanity’”,[xviii] and this sense of shared humanity may be what ties the ideas together. 

Beyond the Parable and the Golden Rule

But does that explain why Luis de Carvajal el Mozo seems to replicate Gulliver’s distasteful remarks about humans and laudatory comments on horses? After all, Gulliver id not Pedro Mendez and is, in fact, a mad Englishman who confuses horse sense, or rather, horses without emotions but with reason, with human wisdom. Carvajal has good reason to be angry at the clergy in Mexico who have worked within the Inquisition to persecute him and his family, and to feel polluted by association with religious who seem to him uneducated and bigoted. Moreover, as a Crypto-Jew trying to maintain his ancestral faith against great odds and with limited access to rabbinical texts, let alone individuals properly trained in Talmudic lore, Luis transforms his resentment into physical aversion. The preference for horses, however, seems to mark him as a madman, perhaps in the same sense that Gulliver is insane. There is nothing in Judaism, biblical or rabbinical, which could justify this inversion of human sympathies. 

      The problem is that Marranos and Crypto-Jews were often mad, driven insane by the constant paranoia, the humiliation, anxiety, and pain of their condition. Madness in such a sense does not necessarily mean wild, raving delusions. It can mean profound depression to the point of suicide or dangerous numbing of affects to the point of cruelty to others. It can also mean, however, a creative liberation of the mind and its imagination from the constraints of normal social conventions and intellectual systems. Thus, when Gulliver arrives in Lisbon on 5 November 1712—a date resonating with the carnivalesque celebrations of Guy Fawkes Day, with all its anti-Catholic revelry—there are two kinds of disguise and deception involved. On the one hand, Gulliver is  
“forced” by the captain “to cover myself with his cloak, to prevent the rabble from crowding about me.” On the other hand and at the same time, Gulliver at his own request is “led…up to the highest room backwards.”[xix] Furthermore,

I conjured him to conceal from all persons what I had told him of the Houyhnhnms, because the least hint of such a story would not only draw numbers of people to see me, but probably put me in danger of being imprisoned, or burnt by the Inquisition.. 

There is a clear madness, “terror”, in Gulliver, exaggerated and ridiculous, for Gulliver to fear the Inquisition because of his story of the rational horses, although he might have feared arrest as a secret agent of a Protestant nation, despite the good diplomatic relations between Portugal and England. More likely might have been the danger to Pedro de Mendez and his servants for covertly bringing in a Protestant Englishman into Lisbon and hiding him in their house. Gulliver also is dressed in the skipper’s clothes because in size the two men were nearly the same. The main point, though, here is that in addition to being brought secretly into Portugal and hidden under the captain’s cloak, Gulliver tries to mask his experiences, the tale that gives him his unique identity.

      But while in the reverse images of his madness Gulliver congratulates the Portuguese skipper for his “very good human understanding” (Swift’s italics) and therefore finds that he “really began to tolerate his company”, when he is able to overcome his terror sufficiently to walk in the streets of Lisbon he “kept my nose well stopped with rue, or sometimes with tobacco”,[xx] this last madness of visceral disgust for all human beings in the collective essence cannot be hidden: yet is not noticed, of course, because it is an affectation of the proud hidalgo, as it is of the vain English gentleman, to be disgusted by the foul smells of ordinary humanity and social life. 

      After ten days, despite Gulliver’s protestations that he would rather live on a deserted island, Pedro de Mendez arranges for him to board an English ship and return to his family in London. The argument used by the Portuguese captain is persuasive “as a point of honour and conscience” but perhaps only because Gulliver has no real alternative. The actual debate between the men is not given because the narrator believes they would be “tedious” to the reader, a formula that usually means they would be embarrassing to Gulliver, detrimental to his pride. We may imagine that Mendez’s concern is to have his guests returned to a place where he can receive proper medical attention and care from his family. Without financial means—the skipper has to loan him twenty pounds for the journey—and likely to be taken into custody as an illegal migrant at the very least, if not as a raving lunatic, Gulliver departs for his home. Pretending to be sick to avoid his fellow passengers, he survives the voyage as a kind of crypto-lunatic, just as he survived his stay in Lisbon by wearing his host’s cloak and hiding his face in a bouquet of rue, and so pretending to be an arrogant lord. 

      The comparison to Luis de Carvajal el Mozo is both striking and confounding. The contrast between them undercuts Géracht’s reading of Swift’s text as a satiric parable because there is no way we can understand the Crypto-Jew’s disgust with the friars and preference with sitting in the stable with horses as a variant on the Good Samaritan tale. To begin with, one must understand that in rabbinic tradition there is no strict distinction between exegetical enhancements, exemplary or moral tales, parables and riddling stories, and moreover they do not seek clear and distinct meanings. In fact, the rabbis say:”There were three thousand parables for each verse, a thousand and five reasons for each parable. What is written is not, 'And the song of Solomon,' but rather, 'And its application' [yielding a thousand and five reasons behind each of the parables].” This is not, however, to say that anything goes and there are no rules. Far from it. But it does mean that meaning is always newly constructed and individuality and specificity of occasion are more important than heuristic generalities and vague principles.

      To approach the comments in Carvajal’s Autobiography, we need to ask about the normative Jewish attitude towards horses. Unlike many other ancient peoples in the Near and Middle East who used the horse for warfare and farming, the Jews seem to have not exploited the labour of these beasts, nor to have used them in religious sacrifices. They also did not develop horsemanship during the Hellenic or Hellenistic periods.[xxi] Eliezer Segal points out that, for the most part, Jews and horses do not go well together. Ari Kahn explains this attitude further in terms of what is called by the Netziv (Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin, 1817-1893) “the philosophy of the horse and the rider”. The specific proof-text is from Exodus 15:21, “The Song of the Sea”:

As the rider rides on the subjugated horse, so must the rider listen to the officer, and that officer listen to the general, and that general listen to the commander in chief. According to the Netziv, this describes the horrors of the Egyptian society, a series of horses and riders, where the Jewish slaves became the bottom of the proverbial “totem pole”—the lowest horse supporting the entire structure.

When the Children of Israel demand their freedom from bondage in Egypt, as explained in Midrash Tehillim 136:6, Ancient Tanchuma Bo 18), cited by Rabbi Kahn,: It is as though “[t]he horses are rebelling against their riders, as the underpinning of Egyptian society is forever vanquished.”

    Another midrash gives something more of this attitude, in which the horse, while credited with sense—and even compared to a patriarch—is nevertheless not perceived as a realistic part of Hebrew culture. Rabbi Shlomo Riskin cites this passage that explains how Abraham’s father, Terah, refused to offer his son as a blood sacrifice:

Nimrod sent a letter to Terah, promising him a house filled with silver and gold if he would allow his son to be killed. Terah replied with an allegory: “To what can your offer be compared? To a horse who is told: ‘Let us cut off your head, and we will give you a house full of oats.’ So the horse said, ‘Fool, if you cut off my head, with what will there to be to eat the oats.’ Now if you kill my son, who will inherit the silver and gold?”[xxii]

The horse is not set up as a model of reason and morality, as its simple logic shows; and indeed, the pre-Scriptural logic of Terah carries none of the Jewish wisdom attributed to Abraham, especially in the parallel situation of the Aqedah where he is tested in the request that his son Isaac besacrificed. In fact, as Adin Steinsaltz points out in a discussion of Elul,

A horse remains a horse even if one puts tefillin (phylacteries) on him each day—and he will not even become more holy because of this. It is possible for a person to put on tefillin, perform commandments, study Torah from time to time, and do many more things during the course of his life, without being very different from a horse. The difference between man and beast lies in the goal, not in the particulars of one’s life….True, a horse is an impressive creature and all of his actions bring praise to the Almighty, but being human is much more difficult and complex.[xxiii]

  Socially and culturally, to the Hebrew people, horses represented civilizations of idolatry and persecuting nations, and to own or ride a horse was to be suspected, at the very least, of collaboration with the enemy, as well as behaving pompously and immorally. As a rule, almost without exception, “horses were associated with the qualities that were most antagonistic to Jewish value: oppression, arrogance and atheism.”[xxiv] On the other hand, since owning and riding a horse marked authority and magnificence, rabbis also felt that Jewish heroes should have possessed such steeds as the Greeks and Romans had. Segal points out that:

For this reason, a Talmudic tradition related that the authors of the Greek translation of the Torah had altered the sacred text, so that Moses would be described as riding a horse, in keeping with his position of leadership, rather than on a lowly donkey, which have disgraced our greatest prophet in the eyes of foreign readers.

      When it comes to Crypto-Jews like Carvajal and his family, however, at least two additional features come to the fore. First, as a converso, Luis would have absorbed the Iberian pride in horsemanship, and like any would-be hidalgo would have grown up with a love and knowledge of horses.[xxv] Second, part of the way in which a secret Jew could hide his tainted ancestry was by exaggerating those cultural traits associated with the dominant and persecuting group and least associated with the despised community. This ambiguity of associating oneself with horses also has a Jewish history. According to Segal,

So obvious was it that loyal Jews would not ride horses that…a group of Pharisaic rabbis, in the days of the Sadducee king Yannai, fled to Lebanon in a time of sectarian persecution, and were able to conceal whiter presence from hostile pagans by tying a horse to the front gate of their hiding-place. Potential assailants simply ruled out any possibility that pious Jews could have a horse parked in front of their house.

But if this kind of equivocation signals a tendency among New Christians to adapt and manipulate expectations to their own advantage, it hardly explains the case of Carvajal’s preference for eating his bread with horses in the stable rather than at the refectory table with monks or friars. The usual distaste for equine company would therefore, as in the case of the allusion to the Good Samaritan in Gulliver’s case, could therefore, at least to a certain extent, indicate how much more the secret Jew hated his persecutors than the animals who often symbolized that persecution. But the rabbinical tradition does not provide the textbook definitions Swift relied on to turn Houyhnmland into a topsy-turvy parody of humanism. The old saw ran that: man is rational because he is a talking animal, a horse is an irrational beast that whinnies but does not talk. Even the modification spoken of in a letter to Alexander Pope, at a time when Gulliver’s Travels was a joint project of the Scribblerians, that mankind was at best “capable of reason,” does not match the talmudic formula as given by Segal:

The person on the horse is the king, the person on the donkey is a free man, the person wearing shoes is a human being, and the person who has none of these is worse than someone who is dead and buried.

The cynical and satiric mode here does not seek a simplistic antithesis of reason versus unreason or human versus beastly, as Swift does in the inverted model of Houyhynhm (the sound of a horse’s whinny) and Yahoo (the cry of the unsophisticated mob). The rabbis of the Talmud here, in a provocative riddle, set out degrees of social and moral recognition, with the figure of the king astride his horse only better really than the mountless and shoeless wretch who is better off dead. Each of the options opens up room for extended discussion and debate, as is the way with a rabbinical moshel or parable. Hence, following these rules, Carvajal may be saying that the religious who eats well at table is a hypocrite and an agent of persecution; that the person who sits at their table is a dupe or collaborator in their nefarious deeds; that the one who takes his own bread in the stable with horses is a free man, a Jew who follows the Law of Moses; and the horses in the stable munching on hay are natural and free unlike their saintly masters. Along these lines, Swift’s exemplary tale may be read in the following way to supplement the normative manner given so cogently by Géracht: From one perspective, Gulliver’s wife and children at table in the house are no better than Yahoos; that the man who chooses to sit and talk with horses in the stable allies himself with the Hoyhnhms, even if at a distance and with creatures enslaved by European convention; and the horses themselves, eating hay and pulling coaches, are, in spite of their degraded status, still closer to the reasonable ideal than the human beings who exploit their labour. From another perspective, however, Gulliver’s family are ordinary human beings whose suffering is extended by the folly of a man who will not return to his medical practice and leaves them to look after themselves as best they can; the madman who prefers horses to humans and alienates himself from normal life carries his critique of European follies and foibles way beyond commonsense and exposes the stupidity of an exaltation of reason over the “subtle knot intrinsicate” (to use Donne’s phrase) that marks the human condition; and the dumb horses in the stable indicate the limits of nature itself bereft of the human capacity for reason and speech, while their service to mankind is a reasonable and divinely-sanctioned duty. Carvajal’s preference for horses to monks is a deliberate insult to the Church and a subtle disguise for his disgust, even at the expense of feigned or real madness. Gulliver’s preference for horses to his family and fellow human beings has a very weak foundation in satire of European political and social irrationality and marks an insanity consequent to an inability to distinguish between commonsense experience and logical imperatives. Commonsense leads to tolerance and moderation, logic to bigotry and persecution.

Alboraicos

Still another way to look at texts in question comes from consideration of a late fifteenth-century anti-Jewish book.[xxvi] Nicolás López Martínez added an appendix called “Alboraico” to his 1488 treatise on Los judaizantes castellanos y la Inquisición en tiempo de Isabel la Católica.[xxvii] This is a book known to have been in Torquemada’s library in the monastery in Segovia[xxviii] In this appendix, written anonymously, the unknown author expatiates on the analogy between al-Buraq, Mohammed’s snow-white steed that flew him from Mecca to Jerusalem, with brief stops at Mount Sinai and in the village of Bethlehem, and then to the seventh heaven. While nominally a horse, al-Buraq—the name in Arabic means lightning, as Barak does in Hebrew in the story of Deborah in the Book of Judges—“is sometimes described as having a human face, the ears of an ass, the body of a horse, and wings and tail like a peacock.”[xxix] In some texts, the horse is a mare with a woman’s face.[xxx] In addition, this creature was supposed to have spoken in pure Arabic with a human voice. In Iberian anti-Jewish writings, alboraico becomes even more grotesque and monstrous, since it can be male and female at once, and thus represents all the anomalous and frightening qualities of the Jew that were excoriated by fanatic preachers. More specifically, this wondrous talking horse becomes an emblem for the secret Jewish converts thought of as subverting true Hispanic virtues and poisoning the blood of the Old Christians of Iberia. In other words, moved out of its Islamic context into early modern Spanish anti-Semitism, the term alboraico took on a purely demonic significance and revealed the deceit, subterfuge and vicious qualities of the Jew. Some of the relevant passages, translated by Longhurst, are as follows:

·                                 The face of a horse + The horse, because of his quickness and daring, is uised in war for spilling the blood of humans. Likewise these Alboraicos used their speed and boldness to kill the prophets Isaiah and Zacharias, as well as the apostles and martyrs and our Lord Himself. For they know not the way of peace and the fear of God is not in their eyes. And those who have fled Spain to escape the justice of the Inquisition have, as everybody knows, gone to join the Turks to help spill the blood of Christians….

·                                 The neck of a mare, with a mane + The mare is useless for any kind of hard work, preferring instead to promenade idly about the square. So too with the Alboraico: he is not any good as a labourer or as a soldier against the enemies of the Faith. Instead, like the mare, he prances about in public in all his finery….

·                                 On the peacock, the head of a crane + The crane is a cowardly creature, always in hiding, just as the Alboraico lives in fear and trembling among Christians, always trying to hide his true character from them….

·                                 The other foreleg: the leg of a horse with a horseshoe + Whenever they get a Christian in their power they kick and squeeze and crush him like grapes in a winepress….

·                                 The hair of all colors + They perform all kinds of evil. Among Jews they say they are Jews; among Christians they claim to be Christians. They adapt themselves readily to whatever pretence they think will do them the most good.[xxxi]

In another place, the anonymous author included by Martinez, claims that

…the backsliding Converso is pompous , vainglorious, wicked, cruel, impenitent, inhuman, insane, damned, condemned, scorned of God. He is consumed with indolence, wanton arrogance and diabolical envy….He is a devil, dog-man, mongrel, sodomite, venomous viper, poisonous asp. His temple is the Synagogue of Satan and he is the Antichrist on earth.[xxxii]

In brief, as Longhurst sums it up, “The Alboraico, a ballad of hate in a chorus of death and destruction, transformed by the alchemy of righteousness into a hymn of exaltation to Alm ighty God.”[xxxiii] 

      Since Luis de Carvajal was given relatively free access to many monastic libraries during his penitential period, he may have come across this book of slanders; or he may have picked up knowledge of the grotesque emblem of the judaizante alboraico in conversations with friars and monks attempting to instruct him in the true Catholic faith by means of insults and humiliations. From it, he would have learned that, although a reconciliado, he remained tainted by impure Jewish blood, and hence embodied the same ambiguities and anomalies that were seen in the alboraico. In brief, that he was a kind of speaking horse. For that reason, it is not hard to imagine that he turned those insults into a private satiric and this a means of attacking the agents and dupes of the Inquisition by taking more pleasure in associating with the creatures in the stable than the hypocrites at the refectory table and their empty talk of Christian love and salvation. 

 



[i] Martin A. Cohen, trans., “The Autobiography of Luis de Carvajal, the Younger”, originally published in Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, Vol. 55 (1966) and now reprinted in Martin A. Cohen, ed., The Jewish Experience in Latin America: Selected Studies from the Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society (New York: KTAV, 1971) p. 237.

[ii] Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, ed. Clement Hawes (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004) p. 274.

[iii] Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, pp. 274-275.

[iv] The circumstances in Book III and its series of bizarre and exotic lands are in a different category.

[v] Clement Hawes’ New Riverside Edition cited above.

[vi] Maurice A. Géracht, “Pedro de MendezMarrano Jew and Good Samaritan in Swift’s Voyages” Swift Studies 5 (1990) 39-52; see also. Hermann J. Real and Heinz J. Vienken, “What’s in a Name: Pedro de Mendez Again,” ANQ (May/June 1986) 136-140. The argument seems to go round in circles and never addresses the points made in my essay.

[vii] Hawes, Gulliver’s Travels, p. 271, note on Pedro Mendez.

[viii] Géracht, “Pedro de Mendez” 40, n. 9.

[ix] Géracht, “Pedro de Mendez” 42.

[x] Géracht, “Pedro de Mendez” 44.

[xi] Géracht, “Pedro de Mendez” 46.

[xii] Géracht, “Pedro de Mendez” 47.

[xiii] Géracht, “Pedro de Mendez” 50.

[xiv] José Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jewsa and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992) p. 32.

[xv] Faur, In the Shadow of History, pp. 33-34.

[xvi] Hawes, Gulliver’s Travels, p. 272.

[xvii] Faur, In the Shadow of History, pp. 32-334.

[xviii] Real and Vienkin, “What’s in a Name” 138.

[xix] Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, p. 273.

[xx] Faur, In the Shadow of History, p. 274.

[xxi] Morus (Richard Lewinsohn), Animals, Men and Myths: A History of the Influence of Animals on Civilization and Culture (London: Victor Gollancz, 1954) pp. 88-91.

[xxii] Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, “Focus on the Future: Torah Study”, Jewish News of Greater Phoenix 52:8 (22 October 1999) online at http://www.jewishaz.com/jewishnews/991022/torah.

[xxiii] Rabbi Adin Even-Yisrael (Steinsaltz), “Elul’s Intimate Soul,” a shiur (oral lecture) summarized by his students (1998) online at http://www.yeshiva.org.il/midrash/print_shiur. asp?id=2610.

[xxiv] Eliezer Segal, “Horse Sense”, From the Sources online at http://www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/ Shokel/000629_HorseSense.

[xxv] An Anti-Semitic website, as so often happens, pinpoints some of the key issues to be considered about the impact of Crypto-Judaism on Iberian society. “El converso es el contrapunto del hidalgo. El criptojudío busca la especulación y se desenvuelve bien en ambientes y medios financieros. Es mentiroso, vanidoso, soberbio; practica la doblez frente a los valores de nobleza, fidelidad, sinceridad y humildad (The converted Jew is the opposite of the nobleman. The Crypto-Jew searches for speculation and entangles himself in financial intrigue and deals. He lies, is vain, and proud; he practices a double-faced attack on the values of nobility, faithfulness and humility). Anonymous, “El problema del criptojudaísmo en España”, http://www.resistenciaria.org/judaismo/problema.

[xxvi] Seymour B. Liebman, The Jews in New Spain: Faith, Flame and the Inquisition (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1970) pp. 90 and 346.

[xxvii] A modern edition of this book was printed in 1954 by the Seminario Metropolitano de Burgos. 

[xxviii] John Edward Longhurst, The Age of Torquemada (Sandoval: Coronado Press, 1962) p. 108; available online at http://www.ku.edu/carrie/texts/carrie_books/longhurst/00intro-2.13.

[xxix] Anonymous, “Burak”, Dave’s Mythical Creatures and Places online at http://www.eaudrey. com/myth/burak. See also James Baldwin, The Wonder-Book of Horses (New York: The Century Company, 1905), p. 103; available online in a version by Vanessa Wright Capone at http:///ww.mainlesson.com/display.ph?author=baldwin&book=wonder&story=borak.

[xxx] Longhurst, The Age of Torquemada p. 108;

[xxxi] Longhurst, The Age of Torquemada, pp. 109-111.

[xxxii] Longhurst, The Age of Torquemada, pp. 112.

[xxxiii] Longhurst, The Age of Torquemada, p. 112.

 



Norman Simms was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1940, grew up and educated in the USA, and then moved to Winnipeg, Canada with his new wife. There he had his first university position and raised two small children. In 1970 he moved the family to New Zealand and began teaching at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, where he has been ever since: except for several shorter and longer periods of study-leave (Romania, UK, Spain, Mnalaysia, Singapore, Fiji, Netherlands) and visiting lectureships (France, Israel, Canada, USA). He has founded and edited several scholarly journals (e.g., Mioriþa, The Glozel Newsletter, Mentalities/Mentalités) and literary or cultural magazines (e.g., Pacific Quarterly, Outrigger, Rimu, Rashi, Matrix). He has published scores of essays, articles, and books, the latest of which is Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience (New York: Peter Lang, 2005)


Links:

Norman Simms: Andrés Laguna, Marrano Physician, and the Discovery of Madness (Jan. 4, 2006)

An Essay by Norman Simms in two parts:
Part One: Maria Sibylla Merian in the Cocoon: Childhood Confusions
Part Two: Maria Sibylla Merian: Crises in Spirit, Intellect and Marriage



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