from Jewish Social Studies Volume 4, Number 3

Converso Dualities in the First Generation: The Cancioneros

Yirmiyahu Yovel

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Often, when we are disposed to read them that way, the novels and poems of another era can serve as cogent historical documents. Whether realistic or ironic, equivocal or crudely direct, complexly symbolic or outright vulgar, or a mix of the above, works of fiction will reward the curious intruder ¹ with knowledge, illustration, and insights of a kind that "factual" records and the no-less-tendentious chronicles often lack.²

A particularly telling genre is the fifteenth-century Spanish Cancioneros: collections of vivid, popular poems that flourished parallel to the first converso generation (Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity, mostly by force or harsh pressure). The Cancioneros were often coarse and satirical but also on occasion speculative and intimately personal. Using unadorned language and simple rhyme, the poems dealt, sometimes irreverently, with current events, people, social habits, and institutions, and they also served their authors to quarrel, flatter, defame, and supplicate.³

To the willing reader,⁴ the Cancioneros offer illuminating glances into the converso situation and its early dualities. Surprisingly, many authors of these poems were conversos of the first generation, as was the first compiler of their work, Juan Alfonso de Baena, a former Jew who had been converted to Catholicism during the riots of 1391. Several poems abound in Jewish concepts and Hispanized Hebrew idioms, which readers were presumed to understand. A good many poems attack and defend conversos, voice feuds among conversos, and otherwise articulate their mental and social complexities.

In one poem, the count of Paredes attacks an aspiring converso author, Juan Poeta (Juan of Valladolid), and in so doing offers a vignette of the converso poet, his many faces and unsettled identity:

Each of the following is his name--
Juan, Simuel [Shemuel] and Reduan [Arabic name].
A moor, so he won't be dead,
A Christian, so he'll have more worth,
But a Jew he is for certain,
As far as I can know.⁵

This hostile image is not altogether incredible. The ending is quite revealing. The writer does not claim that Juan is a genuine Jew who merely puts on false masks but that all of his faces constitute his identity; although his Jewish persona appears to be dominant (or at least the most "certain"), this claim is immediately qualified ("as far as I can know"), for the converso's most distinctive characteristic is that no one can know exactly who he is--perhaps not even himself.

Juan Poeta vehemently rejected all of the above imputations and allegations because he was hoping to make a career in the royal court as a full-fledged Christian author. But a more damning allegation linking him to Judaism came from a fellow converso poet, Antón de Montoro. In the guise of a "brotherly reproach," he shot a lethal arrow at Juan's aspirations:

Juan, señor and great friend:
with my very whole heart
I wish to chastise you;
take it as I say,
as coming from a father or a brother,
because we are of a common tribe,
being both Jews, you and I,
and my pains are also yours. (Montoro, 139a)

This is, of course, deadly irony. Montoro's "brotherly care" is self-refuting, because in calling Juan his brother (the equivalent of his fellow "Jew"), he severely damages Juan and exposes his game. We should notice, however, that what Montoro stresses and Juan represses is not their being integral Jews, because as we shall see Montoro did not conceive of himself as such. Rather, he alludes to the dualities involved in being a Judeo-Christian. Although the feud is tainted by personal rivalry, we may, using a modern idiom, say that Montoro basically demands of Juan that he live as an authentic converso, one who does not run away from his inherent ambiguities but faces and assumes them.

The phrase "my pains are also yours" implies the same demand. These pains (daños) are the harms and sorrows caused by the converso plight. In telling Juan they are also his daños, Montoro means to say that they ought to be Juan's pains, too. One cannot escape the Judeo-Christian condition and must not cajole oneself into believing otherwise. Montoro further derides Juan's designs to gain worth (valer) by distinguishing himself as a Christian poet in the royal court. Nowadays, Montoro bitterly decries, conversos can no longer gain worth in Spain, certainly not on such a high level (see his next poem, "More to His Wife," below). All Juan would do in court is produce "[Christian-sounding] sermons" and "couplets without brahones," which "hold neither salt nor water." This will bring him neither honor nor the high office (oficio) he is seeking, so the sacrifice of his identity (to use a modern word again) would be in vain.

Readers in the late-fifteenth century would have recognized the word oficio in this context as alluding to the public offices that, from mid-century onward, had been increasingly denied the conversos on grounds of their "impure blood." As for the word brahones, which puzzles many scholars,⁶ I think it derives from the Hebrew word brahot, meaning religious benedictions, a word that both Montoro and Juan would have perfectly understood. Montoro ridicules the other Judeo-Christian poet for "making sermons . . . without brahones," that is, writing in a Christian vein and lacking any Jewish content, or at least consciously closeting it. We cannot avoid suspecting a grain of self-irony here, since Montoro himself must have done the same on occasion. Yet unlike Juan Poeta, Montoro was mostly frank and unambiguous in admitting his dualities and the Jewish "remnants" affecting his life and mind.

Juan Poeta responded with great violence to Montoro's false embrace. "Call me [rather] your enemy," he almost shouts in writing--"you confeso, you Marrano,⁷ you rounded like a wafer [meaning the Host: an allusion to Montoro's unstable Christianity]. . . . [You are] malicious, inconstant [desigual], more evil than Lucifer, Jew in general [or "everybody's Jew": Judío del general]." This outburst is fantastic but not atypical: one converso showers another with the same invectives from which both are suffering in Spanish society. Juan too has often been called a Jew and also, undoubtedly, confeso, Marrano, and other such derogatory names, but in his rage--or naiveté and self-deception--he presumes that by casting those insults on a rival convert he will break free of the converso identity and evade its predicament. This is a self-delusion, as Montoro has aptly pointed out to him, which makes Juan lose the battle before it begins and renders his castigation pathetic.

Antón de Montoro was more sober and frank, and also more pessimistic. He is, without doubt, the most interesting converso poet of his time. Born around 1404 to a modest Jewish family near Cordova, he was witness to the first converso generation. His former name as a Jew seems to have been Saul ⁸ and his nickname El Jabibe. The date of his conversion to Christianity is unknown; possibly it occurred before his bar- mitsvah, during the crisis provoked by the Tortosa Disputation and the anti-Jewish laws of 1414. As often happened in those days, only part of Montoro's family converted together with him. We know that his mother, Doña Jamila, remained Jewish, at least for a period, which must have strongly affected her son. In adult life he made a modest living in the clothing business. His first known poems date from the 1440s, which may indicate that he had taken a long time cultivating the nerve and spirit required for writing the brash and provocative verses that made his name and, for a short while, won him the patronage of young Pedro Fernandez de Cordoba, Lord of Aguilar.

Aguilar's premature death in 1455 dealt Montoro a severe blow. His personal state was waning even as his fame (or notoriety) grew. Conversos in that period started being barred from public office and honors because of an inherent defect attributed to them (their "impure blood"), and Montoro's writing bitterly echoed this novelty. Perhaps in a defiant spirit, and no doubt with irony--that is, with a dual and contrary intent--Montoro flaunted and exaggerated his own lowly occupation (oficio) and state in life.

Throughout most of his life, Montoro was known--and liked to refer to himself--as El Ropero, meaning roughly "the clothes peddler" (shmate vendor in today's colloquial Yiddish). The appellation indicates a humble position in the garment business, neither artisan-tailor (alfayate) nor full-fledged merchant but one who simply buys and sells used clothes. Although Montoro was not as poor as he would have his readers believe--he gave his daughter a decent dowry of 35,000 maravedis and left similar assets to his two sons and wife--he was attached to the title El Ropero as an ironic literary trademark, and he made use of it in his poems. Perhaps the image of old clothes being bought and sold, re-used and sold again, appealed to him as a figurative representation of his own inconstant and unsettled identity, a recurring theme in the text and subtext of his poems.

Let us examine a few examples. In the following poem, Montoro addresses his converso future wife:

More to His Wife

Since God had wanted us to be
both unlucky [desmazalados]⁹ you and I
and to have but little worth,
we had better both pervert
a single house only, and not two.
For [wishing] to enjoy a good husband
would be a waste of time for you,
and an offense to good reason;
So I, old, dirty, and meek,
will caress a pretty woman. (Montoro, 104)

In this bitter, ironic "wooing poem," Montoro re-imagines himself persuading his converso wife to marry him. It is one of the many texts in which Montoro laments the conversos' inability to fully shed their Jewish aspect and be accepted as Christians. Montoro alludes here specically to the racial stigma attached to conversos after the mid-fifteenth century, portraying them as base human beings unworthy of honors. If so, he says to the lady, why debase two households (by each of us marrying an Old Christian) when we can make do with one? Anyway, no marriage prospect outside the converso fold is feasible for you nowadays, so come, pretty lady, into my old converso arms, and let me draw some advantage from my inferior state.

Thus, through a classic ironical reversal, Montoro's bad luck as a converso becomes the source of his good fortune.

Years later, in a poem addressed to the young Queen Isabel (who had recently ascended the throne), the old Montoro took a sober look back at himself and the experience of the first converso generation. The first two stanzas draw a picture of the artist as an old man, a disillusioned and entrapped converso:

To the Queen Doña Isabel

O sad, bitter clothes-peddler [ropero]
who does not feel your sorrow!¹⁰
Here you are, seventy years of age,
and have always said [to the Virgin]:
"you remained immaculate,"¹¹
and have never sworn [directly] by the Creator.¹²
I recite the credo, I worship
pots full of greasy pork,
I eat bacon half-cooked,
listen to Mass, cross myself
while touching holy waters--
and never could I kill
these traces of the confeso.

With my knees bent
and in great devotion
in days set for holiness
I pray, rosary in hand,
reciting the beads of the Passion,¹³
adoring the God-and-Man
as my highest Lord,
but because of the remnants of my guilt¹⁴
I cannot lose the name
of an old Jewish son of a whore [puto]. (Montoro, 35)

A moving and revealing poem. The last sentence alludes to the converso's social image and standing, whereas the punchline of the first stanza ("never could I kill these traces of the confeso") alludes also to the conversos' intellectual makeup and inner mind. Actually, Montoro betrays his Jewish traces in the very poem that laments their persistence, thus making his point twice, once overtly and a second time in the subtext. The phrase "here you are, seventy years of age, . . . and have never" (Sesenta años que nasciste . . . y nunca) echoes a passage in the Passover Haggadah that every Jew, and every former Jewish boy, would recognize. Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya declares in that passage that he is 70 years of age and has never seen the Exodus story being told at nighttime. Montoro situates his poetic self as an inverted Rabbi Elazar and contemplates his own, converso-like "never." He has never mocked or doubted Mary's virginity, as do the Jews. He has never addressed God directly, in the Jewish manner, but only through Mary or the saints. He has never sworn to God by calling him vaguely "the Creator," to avoid using the plural form Dios. Yet despite all this, he could never eradicate "these traces of the confeso" from his mind and identity.¹⁵

With pathetic irony the writer describes his ceaseless efforts to demarcate himself from the Jews. While Jews abhor pork, he "worship[ped] pots full of greasy pork" (the verb adorar is a mock-religious pun), and whereas Jews are forbidden to eat rare meat, he consumed his bacon half-cooked, thereby committing a dual sin against Judaism--yet still failed to prove his Catholic fidelity. In fact, a lifetime of prayers, devotions, and strict (one is tempted to say kosher) Catholic observance did not make him look any better to the outward world than an "old Jewish son of a whore."¹⁶

There are two kinds of converso "traces" that the poem finds impossible to erase: those inhering in the converso's own mind, and those residing in the minds of others. The latter includes the converso's alleged baseness satirized in the poem to his wife as well as "the remnants of my guilt," namely, the Jews' responsibility for the death of Jesus, which the conversos were forced to inherit.

The Crucifixion

To resist this imputed guilt, which weighed quite heavily upon them, some conversos claimed that their forefathers had already been living in Spain during Jesus' lifetime. They even invented the story that these ancient Spanish Jews had sent a letter to the Jews in Judea protesting the crucifixion! The guilty shadow of the crucifixion recurs persistently in the Cancioneros, including in a poem by Montoro written as a dialogue between himself and his horse. In the end, the horse declares:

And now, señor Antón,
because you have temporalized me,
I grant you pardon
for the one you have crucified. (Montoro, 116)

To understand this cryptic verse we should note that, earlier in the poem, the horse mentioned Dios el temporal ("God the temporal"), undoubtedly referring to Jesus. So "temporalization" alludes to the Incarnation, God's entry into the world of time. Because Montoro has "temporalized" God, he gains pardon for having crucified Him. This seems to mean that because the converted poet has accepted the doctrine of the Incarnation, his share in the guilt of Jesus' crucifixion is annulled, or, at least, ought to be annulled. Montoro demands this annulment as his right, yet he knows and decries that he can get the pardon only in theory, not real life, and not from old Christian society but only from his horse.¹⁷

Montoro's sarcasm in treating this subject occasionally sounds daring. Arguing with the city governor (corregidor) of Cordova, Gonçalo de Avila, Montoro sent this mock warning:

What I could do with Jesus Christ
I can with a corregidor. (Montoro, 69b)

This is not a real threat, of course, but black irony. Through the governor, Montoro tells the world: "Since this is how you perceive me (as a Jew, a deicide, etc.), I shall play the game your way, even to absurdity." Montoro is using a well-known defiant technique: applying to himself a derogatory attribute with which others label him against his will. His message tacitly reverses the implication: it is just as absurd to accuse me of Jesus' death as it is to expect me to kill the corregidor. But again, he knows this can never work as an argument, only as a poetic-rhetorical device.

Pork and the Right to Some Duality

Addressing the corregidor on another occasion, Montoro is daring and sadly sincere in a different way. The city of Cordova, in a move directed against Judaizing conversos, seems to have ordered all butchers to sell pork only. Montoro's response reads:

To the Corregidor of Cordova Because the
Butcher Shop Has Nothing But Pork

One of the true servants
of our mighty Lord the King,
has given the meat dealers
a reason to make me a perjurer.

Not finding, to my grief,
with what to kill my hunger,
they made me break the vow
I had made to my forefathers. (Montoro, 70)

This is a sad poem whichever way we read it. Who are the "forefathers" (agüelos) whose bond Montoro was forced to betray? Are they the ancient Jewish prophets, in which case Montoro is an active Judaizer?

Or are they his own grandparents, who had remained Jewish amidst the waves of conversion and, painfully aware that their grandson was about to convert, at least made him vow that, even as a Christian, he would not eat pork, the utmost abomination for Jews? I think the second is the proper reading. But even so, Montoro's overt moral reproach of the governor is remarkable. The poem is a poignant document demonstrating that it was still legitimate for conversos in the first generation to admit they do not eat pork. Later, when the Inquisition had been established, avoiding pork became a grave offense and a certified sign of Judaizing, which could have disasterous results. This may explain the contradiction between Montoro's poem to the corregidor and his later poem to Queen Isabel claiming that he has always "worship[ped] pots full of greasy pork."

The difference in tone and content between the two poems encapsulates the radical disparity in the conversos' condition before and after the rise of the Inquisition. Montoro had no Judaizing designs; he wanted to be a Christian and to be recognized as one. Yet in his poem to the corregidor he demands the moral right to have some free space for other loyalties too, not to Judaism as such but, in this case, to the personal vow he had sworn to his grandparents; thus he claims the right to some dualism, to some plurality within his person.

A reader familiar with Jewish-Spanish history may recall at this point the forced converts of Visigoth times who meekly begged permission to refrain from pork, citing a residual "natural revulsion."¹⁸ Montoro does not beg, but protests, and his wish goes far beyond the humble Visigoth converts' wishes: he wants legitimation for keeping a personal vow to the Jews, without thereby being considered a disloyal Christian. Montoro's ability to voice his protest in public tells us something about the period preceding the 1470s. After this date, the Inquisition abolished all authorized pockets of plurality and terrorized the Christian community into accepting, at least overtly, a streamlined and homogeneous Catholicism. This eliminated what could have been, and partly had been in the past, a space for human possibilities, for heterogeneous identities that people were allowed to create and espouse without penalty. Yet by a well-known dialectic, the Inquisition undermined its own effort. It did not create a uniform person but rather an oppressive conformity under which duality and alienation thrived, as later attested to by the Spanish Picaresque novels, the main literary outlet for these dualities. Also, because it only repressed but did not eliminate the dissenting identity elements, the Inquisition produced the kind of guilt feeling that Montoro's poems illustrate.

"O What a Marrano He Is!"

Practicing Jews still living in Spain are also attacked and ridiculed in the Cancioneros. But sometimes, as in the following lines by Pero Ferrús, it is unclear whether the conversos are not intended under the same title as Jews.

Here we are gathered,
the people and the hasanes [Heb. cantors],
with all our toils
we place our hope
In the single God (Dio). (AZ. 303)

In stressing the issue of hope and calling God Dio, in the singular, the writer alludes to two conspicuous features we met among Judaizing conversos, thereby making them too his target. Perhaps he even insinuates that all of the conversos are Judaizers. This common belief was sometimes reinforced by none other than the converso authors who tried to clear themselves of the charge of Judaizing by attacking others, or who typically re-projected onto their fellow conversos the abuse they themselves had suffered. Juan Alonso de Baena, the converso poet and early compiler of the Cancioneros, exchanged blows with Ferrant Manuel de Lando (about whom we shall hear later in this article) and with Juan Agraz. Of the latter he says "there has never been a converso / more perverso [perverse]," and "no man is more vil [vile] / in the lineage of the confesil [a grotesque twisting of confeso]."¹⁹ Agraz "adores the old Law / which is the Torah," yet

He gets busy with pork,
the wretched man,
in order to look like a Christian,
putting his hand in his mouth . . .
O what a Marrano he is!²⁰

As we have seen earlier, this kind of exchange between conversos was not atypical. converso poets willingly took up the common practice of exposing the Jewish mind of those who tried hard to appear Christian, even if they did not Judaize at all and sincerely desired to become assimilated, because such cases still involved putting on false airs, namely concealing the Jewish origin and mind that many Cancionero poets depicted as irradicable.

A Kosher, Upper-class Wedding

Rodrigo Cota, a member of a famous converso family, ridicules an upper-class wedding to which he was not invited. The bride was a relative of a cardinal whose name he gives as "Don Pedro Gonçales de Mendoça," and the husband was "a son or nephew" of Diego Arias D'Avila, the king's chief treasurer and the top-ranking converso in the royal court. With gleeful schadenfreude, Cota exposes the hidden Jewish matrix of this worldly event. Cota himself was a distant relative of the bridegroom and happened to know his lineage rather well:

On one side Avenzuzan [Ibn-Shushan]
On the other Abenamias [Ibn-Nahmias]
from his mother Sophomias
from his father all Cohen.

Cousin Cota naturally resented not having been invited to the wedding. Yet he was gracious enough to report that, on that illustrious occasion, the food, at least, was kosher:

In the wedding of this aljama [Jewish community]
neither hard[-shelled] fish
nor fish without scales were eaten. (Quoted by Arbos 1987, 144)

"Diego Arias, Puto"

The bridegroom's patron, Diego Arias D'Avila, was one of the conversos who had climbed to the upper crust of Castilian society when it was still possible. In court, Diego Arias defended the conversos, and indirectly the Jews, against the malevolent designs of Alonos de Espina and tried to stop the plans for establishing the Inquisition. Diego Arias was widely disliked in his time, not only because he served the much-vilified King Enrique IV in the unpopular job of treasury and tax-chief but also because, as the most conspicuous converso in court, he became a symbol of the new Spanish Otherness, the otherness within. This made him the target of many attacks and abuses. He was even tried posthumously for Judaizing by the Inquisition. An anonymous poem treats him like this:

Diego Arias, puto
who are and was a Jew
with you I won't compete [contigo no me disputo]:²¹
You who possess a great lordship,
an Eagle, a Castle, a Cross²²
tell me where you got them,
since after all,
because of your hood-shaped dick²³
you could never have all this, and didn't.

[Diego Arias's "avowal":]

The eagle comes from San Juan,
the castle from Emaus
and on the cross I put Jesus
because I was the commander there.
(Quoted by Arbos 1987, 149-50)

Was Diego Arias a Judaizer? We must leave this question to a separate study. At any rate, his case is comparable at the top to Montoro's at the lower echelon: Diego Arias D'Avila too was unable to eradicate the remnants of the Jew from his identity or to shake the image of a puto converso.

Circumcision, Castration, and Guilt

In the poem on Diego Arias, one should note how Jewish guilt and the Jewish circumcised organ are joined in the converso's satirical portrait. Circumcision was, indeed, quite a prevalent theme in the Cancioneros because of the opportunities it provides for vulgar jokes and, on a deeper level, because of the mysterious link it establishes between sex and religion (not to mention the vague fears of castration it provokes in some uninformed minds). Using the analogy of a "deflowered virgin," the Commander Roman, an Old Christian rival, addressed Montoro by the title Don Poeta Desorado--"Mr. Deflowered Poet." Less metaphorically, Fray Diego attacks the converso Juan de España by saying he has no beçim (Heb. betsim: "balls"); here an explicit association is made between circumcision and castration. Borrowing the voice of a pious Jew and sprinkling his text with Hebrew expressions, Fray Diego goes on clowning:

And the sages of the Talmud
who are called cedaquin [Heb. tsadikim: the just]
say there is no salvation
for one who has no beçim
they hold him to be a villain
who bears no mila [Heb. milah: circumcision]
and is incapable of beila [Heb. beilah: copulation].

This confounds the issue somewhat: we don't know anymore if milah is good or bad for sex. Never mind! The clowning now turns for help to what it takes to be Jewish Kabbalah:

We find in the [book of] Pellim
in both text [peçuquen (Heb. pesukim): statements] and commentary
that he who has no beçim
will not take a pretty woman.
And since in this matter
you did not want [to be] like them [caham (Heb. ka-hem)]
you will go with him to hell [quehynam (Heb. gehinom)]
with the wrath of Saday [Heb. Shadai: God]. (AZ. 501)

The writer not only uses many Hebrew words but also intimates Jewish inner modes of expression. In the beginning of the poem, he assumes the voice of a Jew in the aljama who describes the "great fury" (grant saña) of the early conversions:

Johan de España, what grant saña:
this came of Adonay,
all the aljama was overwhelmed
by the fault of Barçelay.

We all were appalled [espantados]
masters, rabbis, cohenim
by what his sins have done
to this sofar ahenim.²⁴ (AZ. 501)

Commentators usually understand Barçelay to refer to the devil (or to an evil angel), though perhaps it simply refers to Juan de España's original name as a Jew (Barzilay).²⁵ If so, then the second stanza alludes specifically to his conversion, the young scholar and junior kohen (shofar Cohanim) whose sins have driven him to the renegades' camp. Through him, the poem revives the days of shock and crisis caused in Spain's Jewish aljamas by the waves of conversion.

The line "this came of Adonay" (fue aquesta de Adonay) merits special attention. It paraphrases a Hebrew expression from the Old Testament (Meha-Elohim hi--"it came of God") but intentionally changes God's name from the original Elohim to Adonay, the name used by Judaizing conversos.²⁶ Digging a little deeper, we discover a remarkable fact. The verse in question (2 Chronicles, 25, 20) is most befitting, because it deals with a major debacle suffered by the people of Judea and explains it thus: "For it came of God, that he might deliver them into the hands of their enemies, because they sought after the Gods of Edom." How much closer can one get, allegorically speaking, to the converso story in Spain and its theological justification? Edom means Christianity in latter-day Jewish idiom, so the biblical verse in the background, to those capable of tracing it, is acutely suggestive of the calamity that Spanish Jewry suffered after 1391. They were "delivered into the hands of their enemies," or exiled and alienated within Christendom, precisely because, as the verse says, they had "sought after the Gods of Edom"!

It is curious to find so much learned sophistication underlying so rude a poem, but this is perhaps the gist of the Cancionero genre. The writer was a Franciscan monk and a learned man. Was he also a converso? The mere abundance of Hebrew words in his text, some of which are distorted, is no proof in itself, for these words could have been assembled deliberately, and a certain superficial Hebrew vocabulary was almost common knowledge at the time among the educated class. Yet Fray Diego is more deeply versed in Jewish standpoints and forms of expression than would be expected of an ordinary Old Christian. This is further demonstrated in the phrases "both text and commentary," a paraphrase of the well-known Hebrew saying relating to hermeneutics (ehad mikra ve-ehad targum),²⁷ and "with the wrath of Saday," an antonym of the Jewish saying "with the blessing of Shadai" (be-virkat shadai).

It is noteworthy that the verse in Chronicles to which Fray Diego alludes expresses a distinctly Jewish point of view: following the Gods of Edom is a major sin punishable by slavery. Of course, Fray Diego speaks in the literary voice of a Jew in the aljama, but could it not have been his own former voice, now betraying tones of guilt? Not that his guilt could have any practical consequence, because the writer, if he is a converso, does not regret his new situation and has no intention of changing it. His guilt as a converso is inefficacious, an act of memory rather than of will, a residual burden that, on certain occasions, he projects onto other conversos in a tacit and equally inconsequential ascription of blame.²⁸

Residual Words as Mental Signifiers

The abundance of Hebrew expressions in the Cancioneros has more than a folklorist value. A good many readers of these poems were supposed to understand the Hebrew terms, either because of their personal background or because the Spanish culture had absorbed, together with the conversos, certain elements of their language and culture as well. Thus, a mixture of past Judaism and present Christianity had become a small but significant part of the fifteenth-century Spanish experience. In addition, words point beyond themselves; they signify speech, linguistic structures, modes of thought. If language is the medium of the mind, its intimate element, then the residual Hebrew idioms in the popular Cancioneros reveal a broader Jewish mental universe that, although broken and partly disappearing, was still impregnated in New Christian life and existence, underscoring its dualities.

A Parody of a Converso Administrator

Not all satires about the conversos were venomous. Suero de Ribera, a perceptive and ironic observer of manners and lifestyles, drew a diptych of two courtesans in the royal court.²⁹ In one poem he parodies the air and mannerisms of a galant young Christian knight--his fancy costumes, agile movements, affected speech, refined dietary habits, and the social use he makes of music and dance. By contrast, Ribera draws the picture of "another style" of courtesan--a "circumcised young man" with "a large crimson nose" and "a plume stuck behind his ear," who runs the royal accounts or archives. The allusion, of course, is to the many former Jews working for the king's tax-collection and administration. The young official puts on a manner of impartiality and speaks to everyone with an air of "great knowledge" and "mystery." His dietary habits are somewhat oblique. He is said to eat his marinated dishes seasoned "either in butter or oil." This may mean that sometimes he seasons his meat with butter, as a Christian, and sometimes with oil, like a Jew. Alternatively, the phrase could be a copyist mistake on an original text that might have read "in oil instead of butter," in which case the official would be a residual Judaizer. Even so, he also vaunts his blood kinship to Santa Maria, the Savior's mother, whom conversos used to claim as their relative.³⁰ Having arrived from the "abandoned plot" of the synagogue, the converso official rose in the world without exertion, and if "the times do not get better," he may in the end "serve the Torah again" (Hebrew in the text).

Ribera's parody, though prickly, is neither angry nor bitter. One might say he treats the converso official as yet another speciman of the human comedy. Rivera does not denounce his subject but ironizes both him and "the times," the ways of the world in general.

Back to the "Deflowered Poet"

By contrast, Commander Roman was most virulent. His assault on Montoro makes him Fray Diego's match in rudeness, though not in learning. Having addressed Montoro as the "deflowered poet," Roman, perhaps in order not to deprive Montoro of all flora, calls him "the flower of all infidels." He then lists all of Montoro's big crimes and small tricks, among which we read the following allegations, which flatly contradict Montoro's later poem to Queen Isabel:

You know well how to chant
according to your own Law . . .
and [how to keep] the Sabad [Sabbath]
and adore the Torah
which you [the Jews] have always adored . . .
And above all, how to swear to Dio
in the aljama.

Then Roman gets nastier:

Vile Marrano, on whom one spits [escopido],
very havi [Heb. haviv or habib: beloved),³¹
a Jew in all respects,
circumcised by the hand
of the Rabí.

Without debate, Antón, I'd like
to save you the laugh [rixa]
in this hustle.
For, being a good tailor [alfayate],
you have tailored your dick [pixa]
like a hood [capirote].³² (Montoro, 136c)

Roman surely knows that Jews do not circumcise themselves.³³ Can't he simply resist a crude rixa? Or, speaking figuratively, could he actually mean to say that Montoro has indeed tailored himself as a Jew of sorts? Montoro's angry answer leaves the question open. Roman, he retorts, has no Jewish ancestors indeed, because his lineage goes back to Cain. Yet Roman's being un-Jewish has not served him, because he grew up to become "a villain on all sides," a retort to Roman's snap that Montoro was "a Jew in all respects." Listing Roman's many crimes and vices, Montoro also takes a shot at his enemy's mother, who, he says cryptically, was "no less Christian than a Moor." This insinuates that Roman's veins, too, contain mixed and therefore "inferior" blood--a rather cheap and self-defeating accusation on Montoro's part. Again, as in other times and places, the victims of discrimination typically adopt their persecutors' point of view in mutual feuds.

The Heretical Mesumad

In a different example, Alfonso Álvarez Villasandino, perhaps a converso, attacks a converso enemy by calling him a mesumad, the strongest pejorative term by which Jews designate a renegade. Yet in two other poems he accuses the same "mesumad," Alfonso Ferrandes Semuel (Shemuel), of also betraying the Christian religion. Thus, under a rain of invective, the accused is pronounced guilty whichever way he turns and is made to represent a characteristic converso predicament--living in what I called elsewhere "a dual exile."³⁴

The first poem (AZ. 140, pp. 264-65) reads:

This talk (dezir) was made and ordered by the said Alfonso
Aluarez against Alfonso Ferrandes Semuel, the most
crazy person I have seen in the world

I'd like to recite your sorrows,
Alfonso, of whom one must believe . . .
that until this time and age
no greater mesumad has been born,
nor ever will be, as I believe.

"You are over sixty years old now," the writer continues, and a Christian since his forties;³⁵ "as Jew you were a crazy lad, and today you are a wanton old man" with no teeth left, yet still having amorous designs:

I beg of you,
stop acting as if you were a youth,
you tasteless old bear,
for you have never served Love [amor]
nor have been in her company.

This is an unexpected denouement. The old mesumad's guilt now turns out to be reckless womanizing and absurd ambitions in love; his secret is impotence rather than heresy, and his false pretense is youthful virility. But soon the connections do come to light. In another poem (AZ. 141, p. 265), Álvarez addresses Semuel as "world-wise castrate" (capon corrydo). This undoubtedly alludes to old Semuel's circumcision, which popular imagination occasionally associated with castration and hence impotence. Incidentally, this image coexisted in the popular mind with its opposite, the belief that Jews were perversely and powerfully virile. In either case, sex and Judaism were demonically linked together through the myth and mystery of circumcision.³⁶

Semuel's Testament: An Outline of a Handicapped Life

The pièce de résistance in the thorny menu that Álvarez prepared for Semuel takes the form of a feigned "testament" that Semuel is said to have left when he died:

Friends, who have so enjoyed
Alfonso while he was alive,
now with his much lamented death . . .
perhaps you will laugh again
when you read his will . . . .

A testament and codicil
he has ordered as [commo] a Christian . . .
in which his whole handicapped life [su vyda lasdrada]
is sketched in outline. (AZ. 142; my emphases)

Read in a somewhat different light, Álvarez's last claim may be very true indeed. There was something handicapped, fractured, or unfulfilled in this former mesumad's life as an official Christian, as there was for many of his generation. The misspelled phrase su vyda lasdrada can be corrected either into vida castrada (castrated life) or into vida lastrada (handicapped, burdensome life).³⁷ In the first case, the writer would be alluding to Semuel's circumcision (and thereby, metaphorically, to his "Judaized self") and also to the "castrated" mode of existence that Semuel was bound to lead as a duality-ridden Judeo-Christian, unable to bring his life and identity to fruition in either way.³⁸ The latter meaning is also compatible with reading lasdrada as signifying Semuel's "handicapped" or "burdensome" life as a converso. In another poem (AZ. 142), Alvarez speaks of the "torment" and "slaps" that Semuel suffers despite his overall good fortune. So Álvarez, it seems, has had a keener apprehension of the converso's existential troubles than a first glance at his negative text might suggest. Indeed, there could be a streak of compassion running through his derisions and abuses, rendering them a bit more complex. Was Álvarez speaking also about himself?³⁹

Now the content of the testament is spelled out:

To the Trinity
he wills a copper coin [cornado]
of the new ones.⁴⁰
To the Crusades
he gives two eggs, a sign of [his] Christianity.
And as a major charity
he wills a hundred maravedis [a fairly nice sum]
to Jews who will not
work on the Sabbath.

He orders that a Cross
be laid--what madness--at his feet,
and the Koran, that false and stupid⁴¹ scripture,
be put on his chest,
and the Torah [Atora], his life and light,
he wants it on his head . . . . (AZ. 142)

We met this "Converso Trinity" in Juan Poeta's portrait at the beginning of this article. It is a mixture of religions in which Judaism plays the leading, but not an exclusive, role. Like Juan Poeta, Semuel's various faces are a mix of sincerity and disguise. Even when facing death, a moment of presumed sincerity, no one, not even himself, can know for certain what he believes. He emerges as a Judaizer who also has some regard for the other two Spanish religions, and this, given the cultural climate, could only mean that he lacked true regard for any of them. Religious universalism was for the most part incomprehensible to the late medieval mind. One could not espouse more than one of the monotheistic religions, because each and all were mutually exclusive in their own and the others' eyes. A person accepting more than one religion would therefore intimate to the world that he/she accepted no religion at all, branding him/herself a heretic and, in latter idiom, an atheist.

This does not mean that religious universalism had no voice until the Reformation and the early Enlightenment. The fifteenth century saw the radically new work of the Italian Nicolas Cusanus, followed by the German Johannes Reuchlin and other pre-Reformation figures, who found a core of universal religious truth in all historical denominations. In Spain, similar attitudes and vague feelings arose among a subgroup of conversos, without yet being articulated as a philosophic or theological theory. Yet all of this remained marginal. It did not mar the edifice of exclusivist theology that dominated each of the three religious establishments. Priests, imams, and rabbis concurred that there could be only one true religion, namely their own, and only a single way to please God or reach salvation. The Inquisition hardened this view into a Spanish political dogma that a centralized "secular arm" imposed with an iron fist. The few forces working to subvert this monolithic view were covert, marginal, and operating without plan. The conversos, because of their special predicament, made a significant contribution to this underground process, initially through ordinary people's feelings and practical attitudes and, since the sixteenth century, also by way of converso intellectuals (Erasmian and others) who translated these new experiences into ideas.

Further down his testament, fearing that his body might be dragged out of his grave as a heretic (ereje), Semuel orders his donkey and his silk clothes to be converted into cash, with which to bribe the authorities to avoid treating his remains cruelly. Although all three religions would consider Semuel a heretic, it is the Jewish element that, without fully determining his identity, dominates his memory and nostalgia; so--

He leaves his white shirts [a hint of Judaizing]
to some Samas [Heb. shamash: synagogue attendant] in Salamanca
because he prays from the Homas [Heb. Hummash: Pentateuch]
and chants with a good voice
a hymn and a pysmon [song, cantation].

Finally, "to accomplish all this," Semuel appoints as his executor

a Jew of good standing,
by name of Jacob Çidario,
to whom he leaves his sudario [prayer-shawl, i.e., his talit]⁴²
in sign of çedaqua [Heb. tsedakah: charity]
so that he may say tefyla [Heb. tefilah: prayer)
once he [Semuel] is buried in his fonsario [moat or grave]. (AZ. 142)

For people of that period, the testament was a shocking denunciation. To us, it offers some insight, distorted by the lens of satire, into the ambiguities of Judaizers and religious skeptics in the first converso generations, and it reveals how they were presumed to cope with their existentially "handicapped lives."⁴³

Montoro's Actual Testament

It may be interesting to compare this satirical testament with Antón de Montoro's actual testament, which has been preserved.⁴⁴ Montoro too left paltry sums to Christian causes and institutions: two maravedis to the Trinity (Semuel "gave" it a copper coin); two maravedis to the Crusade (Semuel gave it two eggs); five maravedis to his confessor; ten maravedis to the Church of Santo Domingo, "in honor of the sacraments"; six maravedis to the Iglesia Mayor; and another two maravedis to an institution called the Enparedades. On the other hand he left 35,000 maravedis to each to his two married sons, equaling the dowry their sister had already received. To his wife he ordered his movable assets, except gold, silver, and silk (which were probably converted to provide the cash). Montoro's petty gifts to pious purposes are not as insulting as Semuel's, yet they fail to demonstrate any religious devotion. In this they resemble Montoro's poetic oeuvre (Carrete Parrondo counted only two instances in which Montoro addresses the Virgin or the saints).⁴⁵ Religion, it seems, held little spiritual value or existential meaning for him. It was mainly a social institution, a code of correct behavior and a vehicle for integrating and protecting the family.

Doctrinal Dualities: The Will Versus the Intellect

Other converso poets of the first generation were far more sensitive to the spiritual meaning of religion than Montoro. But coming from Judaism and desiring to be sincere, if not outwardly then within themselves, they found it hard to effect the passage between the two religious worlds they straddled.

The Baena poems contain several queries (preguntas) about basic Christian dogmas, wondering how they might be fathomed and accepted. Favorite targets are those dogmas that Jews hold to be irrational: the Trinity, the Incarnation, and God's foreknowledge of sin, which seems to imply His responsibility for evil. The writers' speculative level is simple, their language casual, and jesting is rare in these matters, though when it occurs, it is rather daring. In one unusual example, Nicolás de Valencia wonders why God should have the right to enter another man's wife and conceive a child from her, when among us mortals this is considered adultery! This blasphemous clowning is rare, however. Most doctrinal preguntas are asked in a serene, perplexed tone, which led Charles F. Fraker, Jr., who studied them with attention and subtlety, to conclude that "it would be hard to find a more paradoxical frame of mind as touches religion than that of some of the Baena poets."⁴⁶

One example is Ferrant (Fernán) Manuel de Lando, whose poems express a contradiction between his resolution to accept Christianity and his intellectual difficulties in doing so. His main worry concerned the Trinity. Was God before the Incarnation a single person or already three? If the latter, how could the Son, being human, have preceded the world?⁴⁷ And did the Son separate himself from the two other divine persons when he was incarnated?⁴⁸ Similar ratiocinations, as Fraker reminds us, existed in the Jewish polemics against Christianity; however, Lando is not using them polemically but rather in a mood of personal doubt and perplexity. The former Jew in him fears there is something wrong, conceptually messy, in the Christological doctrine to which the New Christian in him wants, nevertheless, to hold fast.

One of Lando's poems expresses admiration for his contemporary, Fray Vicente Ferrer, who might have been the cause of Lando's own conversion to Catholicism. Lando praises Ferrer for his exploits as a preacher and, particularly, for his power to remove "the doubts which are dangerous / for those ignorant of the Christian faith," among whom the writer, no doubt, counts himself.⁴⁹ Although this laudatio of the famous proselytizer will sound awkward and even convoluted to some readers, I think it indicates Lando's resolve to assume the consequences of his conversion and accept Christianity as his religion while struggling against the "dangerous doubts" that his Jewish and rationalist upbringing invoke in his mind. Lando tries to make his intellect bow to his will, but his attempt succeeded only partially, and he comes out a rather unorthodox Christian, animated more by resolve than by conviction.

More ambivalent and evasive about Christianity was Fernan Sánchez Calavera, to whom Fraker attributes a "thoroughly and unmistakable" Jewish frame of mind, though not in a religious but in a "cultural" sense.⁵⁰ A lover of paradox, Calavera used Jewish concepts and ways of thought, mostly inspired by medieval Jewish philosophy, both to frame dilemmas for Christianity and to try resolving them. Calavera's love for aporetic reasoning, stating both sides of an argument with equal force, may have roots in Talmudic traditions and not just in philosophical skeptics. The outcome, in any case, was not Judaism but dualism, a difficult Christian allegiance infested by doubt and striving for an impossible "simplicity."

In a famous pregunta, Calavera worries about theodicy. Is God the source of evil, since He knows in advance that some of His creatures will sin and go to hell? A good question, which can be applied to all monotheistic religions, though here it appears in a distinctly Christian dress. Further, Calavera--like other Judeo-Christian writers--grapples with the triple God:

Since the Trinity is undivided,
how could the Son be incarnated
and take up humanity?

How could the engenderer
be engendered?
And how could the Consoler
leave the other two [divine persons],
since all three are the same,
neither bigger nor smaller, and undivided?⁵¹

Another good question (if not a very good poem). Calavera does not want to deceive himself. He knows he has found no rational answer to his queries, and he suspects that none is possible. He decides to suspend his intellect in compliance with the church's demand and to seek his salvation in religious simplicity (muy sinplemente; AZ. 526, p. 1063).

This then is Calavera's personal solution. Reason retreats before obedience--that is, before the will. However, retreat does not quench doubts, it only represses them. Calavera's wish not to deceive himself led to a new self-deception, because religious simplicity cannot be attained in this forced and roundabout way. (Can Don Juan decide that his next affair will be a "first love"?) By presenting simplicity (i.e., immediacy) as a strategy, an avowed means for something else, he makes it rather mediated and thereby self-defeating. Simplicity is a paradoxical religious value: it is only available to innocent believers, or to a few great religious figures capable of a "second innocence." We maydoubt that Calavera belonged to either group. "Simplicity" in his case could only be a cliché, a verbal ideal he knows he could not attain; so the poet remained rather complex and divided within himself.

* * *

The forms of duality we found in the first converso generation were reversed many generations later, when Iberian Marranos started returning to official Judaism in Venice, Amsterdam, London, and other cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The mental structure of these "New Jews" was almost a mirror image, in the sense of an inversion, of the duality we met earlier in this article, because in their case a Jewish form of life had to be extracted and re-shaped out of an intellectual universe that had for many generations been Catholic. Similarly, the dialectic of will and intellect was also inverted in the case of the New Jews, whose will was resolved in favor of overt Judaism while their mind remained Catholic in its essential texture.

The duality of the conversos persisted, but its forms and basic structure were transmuted. Generally speaking, the Jewish component of the Judeo-Christian duality was dominant in the first generation of conversos, and the order was reversed in later periods. Some latter-day Marranos, already deeply versed in a Catholic mental universe, practiced a clandestine "Judaism" that became abstract in many respects, the product of a mythical memory and a resolved will that hovered over their Catholic person without actually changing it in a profound way. Thus a dissonance of intellect and will, or of resolve and cognitive makeup, was a primary constituent of the converso/Marrano experience in all of its periods and phases. It was this dissonance, this duality, that marked the converso experience most characteristically and in light of which it ought, I think, be studied and presented.

Notes

1 I say "intruder" because the aesthetic appreciation of a work will sometimes suffer from a dominant historical intention. In certain cases, however, the opposite is true. For example, by learning to trace dual meanings in a text (where they exist) and decipher the hints they send to the outward historical situation, we shall also enhance our capacity to recognize and appreciate irony and equivocation as inherent aesthetic values of the work. This is a frequent feature of Spanish literature in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries--that is, during the epoch of rising official zeal, the Inquisition, and the converso problem.

2 "Factual" chroniclers are not obviously superior to other sources, because the credibility of their sources--testimony and hearsay--is often problematic, and they depend on selective perception and often biased interpretation. In this respect, the artistic or satirical interpretation one finds in literary materials is not "more distant" from reality but a different vision of it, which has the additional benefit of enlivening the dry historical material in a sensual and intuitive manner.

3 In a sense, the Cancioneros were a distant offspring of the popular Arab verses of older times and, more proximately, of the Castilian love of and facility with verse, itself partly a Muslim heritage. (Over 700 poets were active in Castile between the high Reconquest and the Golden Age.) An additional factor could have been the Hebrew poetry of the time, which also became simpler and more common in the fifteenth century as compared with the eleventh through thirteenth centuries.

4 One unwilling reader of the Cancioneros was Fritz Baer, the chief historian of the Jews in Christian Spain, who took only reluctant notice of these texts, saying "there is no need to repeat all of these clownings in a serious historical book" (Toldot ha-yehudim bi-sefarad ha-notsrit [Tel Aviv, 1965], 394). However, Baer as historian only stood to lose from such puritanism. By contrast, a more willing reader was Francisco Cantera Burgos, whose "El Cancionero de Baena: Judíos y conversos en el" (Sefarad 27 [1967]: 71-111) looks at the Jewish and converso presence in one of the chief Cancioneros. From a literary point of view, the "burlesque" element in the Cancioneros is discussed by Kenneth Scholberg, Satira y invectiva en la España medieval (Madrid, 1971).

5 Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa, Luis de Usoz y Rio edition (Madrid, 1974), 93; quoted in C. Arbos Ayuso, "Judíos y conversos: Un tema topica en la poesia medieval," Encuentros en sefarad, Actas del Congreso Internacional de Judíos en la Historia de España (Ciudad Real, 1987), 148 (abbreviated in the text as Arbos 1987). These lines are taken from a larger piece called Coplas del Conde de Paredes a Juan Poeta en una perdonaça en Valencia (published in the Cancionero General de Hernando del Castillo [Madrid, 1958]).

Other poems in the text are quoted from the following editions: Antón de Montoro, Cancionero, ed. F. Cantera Burgos and C. Carrete Parrondo (Madrid, 1984), abbreviated as Montoro, cited by poem number; and Cancionero de Juan Alfonso de Baena, ed. J. Maria Azáceta (Madrid, 1966), abbreviated as AZ., cited by poem number. All English translations are mine.

6 The editors of Montoro's anthology say (p. 338, note b) that in ancient and modern dictionaries, "brahon" means a part of a dress covering the upper part of the arm, but they add quite correctly that "this sense does not appear to fit the context." However, brahot ("benedictions") does fit.

7 Both Confeso and Marrano were pejorative names for converts.

8 This derives from Montoro's enemy, a poet known as Commander Roman, who in one hostile exchange with Montoro wrote: "Although today you are Antón / in the past you were Saul" (Montoro, 136g). (We shall meet more of Roman's attacks later.)

9 An Hispanized expression, from the Hebrew mazal (luck), here given a Spanish form. (Desmazalado could have been a colloquial coinage translating the Hebrew bish-mazal--unfortunate.)

10 Que no sientes tu dolor--this is logically impossible, but poetically effective. A probable interpretation: Montoro is not always aware of the sorrows involved in his situation as a converso; sometimes he too represses them, as Juan Poeta always does, but now Montoro is in a lucid mood and will sadly describe them.

11 Verbally "ynviolata permaniste"--you have remained unviolated. Montoro, and those like him, accepted the Christian dogma about the Virgin that Jews have rejected as a major absurdity.

12 Y nunca juré al creador--swearing "to" is a somewhat curious expression. Montoro's enemy, Commander Roman, precisely accuses him of jurar al Dio. This has two compatible interpretations: addressing God directly, as do the Jews; or calling God vaguely "the Creator" (or, worse, "Dio" in the singular), as do Judaizers who wish to avoid the plural form "Dios."

13 Verbally the knots (los nudos) of the passion. The beads of the rosary and the stations of the passion are here intended together. There also seems to be a further allusion to the Jewish Haggadah here: usually, the events of the Exodus from Egypt are being told in Passover, but here one tells instead the stages of Christ's passion.

14 Those remnants could be either the Jewish guilt of having sent Jesus to his death, which the conversos are made to bear, or the remnants of their own Jewish self (and behavior), which many conversos have not totally erased. I think Montoro alludes to both at the same time.

15 We must not take these statements as strictly biographical; they are poetic constructions, and the "self" they portray is a generalized converso lot. Montoro personally was more ambiguous, as we shall see. Also, the number "seventy" is surely only an approximation. Montoro is using it as a poetic paraphrase rather than a precise statement of his age.

16 Puto today means homosexual, but that was not the meaning then. Perhaps the idea of prostitution was linked in popular invective to the converso situation--having converted for utility, sacrificed a high personal value for gain, and so on.

17 I owe the latter point to my wife, Shoshana Yovel.

18 See Salo Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 3 (New York, 1967), 42; it is also mentioned in E. A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain (Oxford, 1969), 186.

19 Quoted in Scholberg, Satira y invectiva, 307.

20 Ibid., 307-8, from the Cancionero General, 1025.

21 The verb disputar (to dispute) seems here to have the connotation of challenging someone's place or assets. The writer says he does not covet Diego Arias's place, for the reasons that follow.

22 Probably meaning Diego Arias's insignia (a castle was--and still is--the sign of Castile).

23 Capuz, lit. hood-shaped, meaning cut.

24 Shofar is a ritual horn; ahenim is a misspelling of something, perhaps Cohanim--priests or clerics. The phrase may thus mean "a junior cleric" (kohen), which young Juan-Barzilay had been in his youth.

25 I concur with Cantera Burgos's reading in "El Cancionero de Baena," 92-93; he is one of the only scholars to recognize this clear possibility.

26 "Adonay" is used to this day as in Belmonte in northern Portugal, where Marranos still live.

27 "One part text and one part commentary" (literally: "one reading and one translating" [or "exegesis"]).

28 I ask the reader to consider also the section on mesumad, later in this article, before framing a judgment about this conjecture.

29 These texts were first published by Francisca Venderell de Millás in "Retrato ironico de un funcionario converso," Sefarad 28 (1968): 40-44.

30 Venderell de Millás understands "Santa Maria" as referring to the great Spanish-converso family by that name, but it could simply have referred to Saint Mary, the Saviour's mother, to whom the conversos were related as former Jews, and they therefore claimed an advantage over the Old Christians.

31 Sarcastically, Roman may be using Montoro's old Jewish nickname, El Jabibe.

32 The simile here (as in the term capuz in the poem against Diego Arias) is to the male organ's head, which after circumcision looks like a hood at all times. (The religious allusion to a monk's headpiece is probably also intended.)

33 Except in extreme cases of conversos returning to Judaism, which occurred in later generations.

34 The writer's converso origin is not fully established. Americo Castro sees him as a converso (Algunos aspectos del vivir hispanico [Santiago de Chile, 1947], 21), whereas Maria R. Lida de Malkiel treats him as an Old Chrisian (La originalidad artistica de la "Celestina" [Buenos Aires, 1962], 367n). Scholberg, Satira y invectiva, 338-39n, mentions both views without voicing an opinion. Personally, I think the chances are good that he is a converso, because no Old Christian would tell a converso that "a mesumad like him has never been." Given this sharp point, the probability increases that his use of a Hebrew vocabulary (çedqua, tefyla, samas, etc.) derives from personal knowledge. If so, he uses "mesumad" with a self-satirizing connotation.

35 Quanto fuestes Judío / bien quarenta años o mas: Semuel has been a Jew "a good forty years or more." If so, why call him a "lad" (mancebo) when referring to his Jewish period? Does mancebo in this context mean "bachelor"? Or should we conclude that Semuel had converted 40 years before--that is, at the age of 20?

36 The appellation mesumad, disguised as a pun, also appears in the poem against Juan de España quoted above, which reads later: "pues se zo mi somat"--"since he made himself mesumad."

37 This was suggested to me by Moshe Meller, a former assistant who was delightfully enthusiastic about these poems.

38 I do not exactly attribute to the author the intention as phrased here in present-day idiom, but I claim that his text lends itself to this reading. Of course there is a certain breach of communication between us and the author, due to the historical and cultural distance. But this reservation applies to any historical and textual re-interpretation without necessarily disqualifying it. The question remains: does the text allow such a reading, even of a modern paraphrase, if we remember it involves a transformation of meaning, which is more an analogy than a straight citation? If only the analogy can find an anchor in the text, and so long as we are aware of its existence, then it can illuminate something crucial in the text that another reading, which clings to the past idiom only, will miss or obscure.

39 See note 43.

40 Devalued? Or are the "new ones" the New Christians?

41 Reading nescia as necia.

42 His talit, in Spanish sudario, which rhymes with Çidario; hence the executor's name is actually "Jacob talit."

43 I cannot leave the pair Álvarez/Semuel without making a speculative remark. Álvarez's attack against both the living and the dead mesumad make one wonder whether the writer and his target, two conversos named Alfonso, might not be dialectically one. In other words, Álvarez is also satirizing himself: he writes about his own, possible or actual self as a converso who shares the same situation; and thereby Semuel, his victim and enemy, is equally Álvarez's alter ego. Of course, this conjecture is hard to prove, but the possibility is recognized by others. Thus, Adolpho Castro (as reported by Cantera Burgos, "El Cancionero de Baena," 89) regarded Álvarez as a converso.

44 It was originally published by R. Ramirez de Arellano in "Antón de Montoro y su testamento," Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Musees 4 (1900): 484-89. Summarized in the editors' preface to Montoro, pp. 27-28.

45 Montoro, p. 29.

46 See Charles F. Fraker, Jr., Studies on the Cancionero de Baena (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966), 30. This section of my paper is greatly indebted to Fraker's work.

47 That the Son was born "before all ages" (ante omnia saecula), and thus had preceded the world, is part of the credo sung during Mass that conversos heard every Sunday. To Old Christian ears the ring of the credo was routine, but to New Christians it was fresher and commanded more attention--and possible doubt.

48 AZ. 281.

49 AZ. 287.

50 Fraker, Studies, 35, 41.

51 AZ. 526. (An anecdote: while browsing the various Cancioneros for relevant material, Moshe Meller, my assistant at the time, without knowledge of Fraker and similar studies, wrote in the margins of this verse: "on respire un petit air converso" ["one breathes a little converso air"].)