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):
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
…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
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
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
·
Sephardim
is the ancient term for Jews settled in the Iberian Peninsula, from the
Biblical term Sepharad for this part of
·
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
·
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
·
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
…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 (
[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]
[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.
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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