Authors: Norman Toby Simms
ISBN-13: 9780820481203, ISBN-10: 0820481203
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Lang, Peter Publishing, Incorporated
Date Published: January 2006
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Sephardic Jews who voluntarily or forcibly converted to Catholicism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to avoid persecution or expulsion were known as conversos or New Christians. Some tried to live the double life of a Crypto-Jew, outwardly embracing Christianity while secretly maintaining Jewish practices. Others were in a state that was neither Jewish nor Christian, and, as painful and humiliating as it was, these Marranos (a term for conversos that became abusive), actually created a new kind of modern personality. By tracing the usage of this disparaging term, Masks in the Mirroralso explores the nature of the historical circumstances as it becomes evident that anyone living under these circumstances-constantly threatened and persecuted by the Inquisition and suspected of being heretics and untrustworthy by their Christian colleagues and neighbors-could be driven to a state of madness. Focusing on families and childrearing, this book attempts to grasp the structures of feeling that created such madness, which while debilitating could often be creative and exciting, especially among poets, playwrights, and novelists. It looks at the play of masks, the secrecy and the illusion, that Marranos experienced daily, which some attempted to exorcise in their writings, and it explores the possibility of applying the concept of Marranism generically.
Preface | ||
Ch. 1 | What's in a word? | 1 |
Max Nordau's comments | 3 | |
On the Crypto-Jews of Israel | 5 | |
The hidden emblem of pride | 7 | |
Marranism : Judaism without God | 16 | |
Marrano mentality and the baroque midrash | 18 | |
Stressful fantasies of the baroque soul | 26 | |
Ch. 2 | Marranism reconsidered as duplicity, creativity, and lost innocence | 35 |
The masks in the hidden mirror | 41 | |
The face without a mirror | 49 | |
Labyrinths of delirium | 54 | |
Phantoms in the looking glass | 59 | |
Almost too weak to talk | 65 | |
Ch. 3 | Lost mirrors of innocence | 73 |
The cracking of the mirror and the scattering of masks | 77 | |
Group images in the mirror of anxiety | 83 | |
Discombobulation by midrash | 104 | |
Ch. 4 | Confusion and madness : Miguel de Barrios, alias Daniel Levi | 113 |
Marranos, madmen and monsters | 114 | |
Through the hysterical and mystical looking glass | 114 | |
Contrafactum and counterfeit | 117 | |
In the distorting mirror of baroque poetry | 121 | |
The year of decisions and depression | 125 | |
Mid-life crisis or spiritual awakening | 132 | |
Diagnoses and extrapolations | 136 |