George Eliot

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Writing Spanish History: The Inquisition and 'the Secret Race'

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SOURCE: "Writing Spanish History: The Inquisition and 'the Secret Race'," in Figures of Conversion: "The Jewish Question" and English National Identity, Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 127-73.

[In the following excerpt, Ragussis explores the idea of woman as the daughter, or preserver, of a race, and the historical implications of Jewish culture in Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy.]

Fedalma in George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy is a portrait of the heroism of the female heart. The entire project of The Spanish Gypsy was framed from the beginning by an attempt to understand in what ways the genre of tragedy could function as a category of the feminine—that is, as a representation of a specifically female action. The project began with Eliot's meditation on a painting of the Annunciation, as she records in her "Notes on the Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in General":

It occurred to me that here was a great dramatic motive of the same class as those used by the Greek dramatists, yet specifically differing from them. A young maiden, believing herself to be on the eve of the chief event of her life—marriage—about to share in the ordinary lot of womanhood, full of young hope, has suddenly announced to her that she is chosen to fulfil a great destiny, entailing a terribly different experience from that of ordinary womanhood. She is chosen, not by any momentary arbitrariness, but as a result of foregoing hereditary conditions: she obeys. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord." Here, I thought, is a subject grander than that of Iphigenia, and it has never been used.

Eliot's example of the Annunciation invites us to see the way in which the mortal father becomes transformed into a kind of god for whom the daughter functions as the obedient handmaid or sacrificial victim…. [In] The Spanish Gypsy the daughter is sacrificed to the father as God. Hence Fedalma "knelt, / Clinging with piety and awed resolve / Beside this altar of her father's life, where she obediently sacrifices her own life while taking the pledge of worship: "He trusted me, and I will keep his trust: / My life shall be its temple. I will plant / His sacred hope within the sanctuary / And die its priestess."

While Eliot defined the function of "hereditary conditions" in tragic plots in a variety of ways, more and more she came to mean racial conditions: "A story simply of a jealous husband is elevated into a most pathetic tragedy by the hereditary conditions of Othello's lot, which give him a subjective ground for distrust"; "a woman, say, finds herself on the earth with an inherited organization; she may be lame, she may inherit a disease, or what is tantamount to a disease; she may be a negress, or have other marks of race repulsive in the community where she is born" [George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, 1885]. Even in the central paradigms of Iphigenia and Mary, Eliot represents woman's tragic hereditary function as the sacrifice of the daughter either to preserve or to found a people. In the tradition of historical romance within which The Spanish Gypsy is written, such a function becomes concentrated in the notion of woman as the daughter of a race—Rebecca, "the daughter of Israel," or Leila, the "daughter of the great Hebrew race." Once the nineteenth-century concept of race became the medium through which Eliot would realize the tragic circumstances of her own version of the Annunciation, fifteenth-century Spain seemed the inevitable choice for the "set of historical and local conditions" that would embody her idea: "My reflections brought me nothing that would serve me except that moment in Spanish history when the struggle with the Moors was attaining its climax, and when there was the gypsy race present under such conditions as would enable me to get my heroine and the hereditary claim on her among the gypsies. I required the opposition of race to give the need for renouncing the expectation of marriage" [George Eliot's Life]

In choosing fifteenth-century Spain, Eliot selected what had become for the nineteenth century a kind of historical laboratory in which experiments on the question of race could be performed. Moreover, her growing concern over national and racial injustices climaxed in her decision to record the Gypsies' historic plight and to represent through it, at least at one level, the persecution of more than one racial minority. As early as 1856, Eliot was praising Harriet Beecher Stowe for the invention of "the Negro novel" and was comparing Stowe with Scott in the use of "that grand element—conflict of races [Essays of George Eliot, 1963] So, in The Spanish Gypsy, the chief of the Gypsies encourages the other persecuted minorities of fifteenth-century Spain, "Whether of Moorish or of Hebrew blood, / Who, being galled by the hard Spaniard's yoke," to become allies of the Gypsies. He addresses the Moors and the Jews as "Our kindred by the warmth of Eastern blood" and thereby begins a series of oppositions that pit the "white Castilian" against "the dark men." When the Gypsy chief mocks the conversion of the Gypsies by taunting, "Take holy water, cross your dark skin white," Eliot alludes to both the historic Spanish missions to the Americas and the contemporary English missions to Africa and India.

At the center of Eliot's text is the question of the heroine's identity, or how she is to be named. Fedalma is raised a Christian, rumored to be a Jew, dressed as a Moor at one point, and claimed by the chief of the Zincali as a Gypsy. While Father Isidor, cast in the conventional role of the fanatical Dominican Inquisitor, contemplates Fedalma's torture and death, Zarca, the chief of the Zincali, arrives to save her from the Inquisition. Zarca explains to Fedalma that he is her father and that she was stolen from him by a band of Spaniards when she was a young child. In requiring that she not marry Silva, her Spanish lover, the father asks his daughter to sacrifice herself in the name of the father, or the name of race, and thereby to exchange her individual identity for a corporate identity: "Fedalma dies / In leaving Silva: all that lives henceforth / Is the poor Zincala," the Spanish Gypsy of the title. This is the moment of the daughter's obedience. Zarca explains that as the sole offspring of her widowed father, she is the "Chief woman of her tribe" and that after his death she will be the tribe's leader. In prohibiting the marriage with Silva, the father offers the daughter a different kind of marriage, and Fedalma accepts: "I will wed / The curse that blights my people," and "Father, now I go / To wed my people's lot." The conventional marriage plot is reconfigured here as the means by which the daughter serves her father as the bride of his people. Intermarriage with the racial other is canceled in a figure: marriage with the entire body of one's own race.

With the death of the father, the text ends with the daughter's journey to Africa in an attempt to realize his plans to establish his people's national identity. Fedalma's journey is represented as the kind of exile we associate with Scott's Rebecca—an exile based in the sacrifice of the erotic. Moreover, Eliot makes clear the hopelessness of Fedalma's political ambitions. With the death of her father, "the tribe / That was to be the ensign of the race, … would still disperse / And propagate forgetfulness," in a diaspora in which Fedalma's relinquishment of marriage and childbirth turns into a bitterly ironic form of propagation, the engendering not of ancestral continuity but of forgetfulness. Fedalma's procreative function is reinvented through a tragic pun: "I am but as the funeral urn that bears the ashes of a leader." The daughter's body becomes no more than a kind of grave for the memorialization of the dead father.

But this kind of tragic irony does not finally displace the central ideology of the text, voiced in the father's scathing denunciation of intermarriage and conversion:

Such love is common: I have seen it oft—
Seen many women rend the sacred ties
That bind them in high fellowship with men,
Making them mothers of a people's virtue:
Seen them so levelled to a handsome steed
That yesterday was Moorish property,
To-day is Christian—wears new-fashioned gear,
Neighs to new feeders, and will prance alike
Under all banners, so the banner be
A master's who caresses. Such light change
You call conversion; but we Zincali call
Conversion infamy.

In recording the procedures by which women of a minority race or religion are absorbed by the men of the more powerful group, Zarca adds conversion to the crimes of rapine and murder by which the systematic genocide of a people proceeds. And Eliot, however she might sympathize with the tragic loss and suffering of her title character, upholds the paternal critique of conversion.

Eliot uses the specific example of the "hurry to convert the Jews" in fifteenth-century Spain to ground historically what often appears to be her text's exaggerated horror of apostasy. While the main characters of The Spanish Gypsy are Catholics (Silva and Isidor) and Gypsies (Fedalma and Zarca), it is in her depiction of a converted Jew (Lorenzo) and a practicing Jew (Sephardo) that she attempts to provide the historical basis for her study of conversion. Even the portrait of her Gypsy heroine takes as its model the more well-known example of the converted Jewish woman; while Silva points to Fedalma's baptism, Father Isidor protests: "Ay, as a thousand Jewesses, who yet / Are brides of Satan." But Eliot fails to represent the historical complexities of the issue of conversion in Spain. Instead, she is quick to make an example of the Jews to advance her argument against conversion. This results in making the converted Jew no more than the kind of opportunist Zarca warns Fedalma of becoming—the man or woman who would convert to "win / The prize of renegades":

Thus baptism seemed to him [Lorenzo] a merry game
Not tried before, all sacraments a mode
Of doing homage for one's property,
And all religions a queer human whim
Or else a vice, according to degrees.

Because Eliot focuses on the converted Jew who easily quits his Judaism to assume a new religion for self-advantage, as in the case of the "fathanded" Lorenzo, her Jewish convert never seems to be the product of the fierce religious intolerance and racism that periodically erupted in Spain, especially in the pogroms of 1391, when masses of Jews were converted on threat of death. Instead, her portrait of the converted Jew seems to function as an indictment of Jewish hypocrisy and opportunism.

This was the prevalent picture of the Jewish conversos in general, and the crypto-Jews in particular, throughout the nineteenth century, as Aguilar well knew: "The fact that the most Catholic kingdom of Spain was literally peopled with secret Jews brands this unhappy people with a degree of hypocrisy, in addition to the various other evil propensities with which they have been so plentifully charged. Nay, even amongst themselves in modern times this charge has gained ascendency." During the nineteenth century the growth of European nationalism and incipient Zionism had this effect on the historiography of the Spanish Jews: those who became martyrs for their religion and race were praised as heroes, while those who converted were vilified as cowardly opportunists and hypocrites. The Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz, an important spokesperson for Jewish rights and a major source of Eliot's knowledge of Jewish history [William Baker, George Eliot and Judaism, 1975], cast Spanish Jews in the opposing roles of martyrs versus cowards, those who "remained true to their faith" versus the "weaklings." Even in the midst of acknowledging the "violent assaults" suffered by the Jews, Graetz spoke of "the weak and lukewarm among them, the comfort-loving and worldly-minded, [who] succumbed to the temptation, and saved themselves by baptism" [Graetz, History of the Jews, 1891-98].

Eliot makes her most scathing critique of the converted Jew through the words of Sephardo, the Jew who takes his entire identity, including his name, from his Jewish ancestry and belief. Sephardo argues against Silva's universal humanism:

… there's no such thing
As naked manhood….
While my heart beats, it shall wear livery—
My people's livery, whose yellow badge
Marks them for Christian scorn. I will not say


Man is first man to me, then Jew or Gentile:
That suits the rich marranos; but to me
My father is first father, and then man.

…..

Sephardo declares his desire to wear the garment of his race—no disguises, and no conversion, for him. But Sephardo's representation of the Marranos as opportunists who reject their fathers and their faith—"I am a Jew, and not that infamous life / That takes on bastardy, will know no father"—is historically inaccurate. In a note to Sephardo's speech, Eliot defines "Marrano" as a name for the converted Jew, but she does not designate by it the more specific meaning, the converted Jew who secretly practices Judaism—as represented, for example, in Aguilar's work, in which Marranism is shown as a way of honoring one's father—by handing down through the generations a faith that was threatened and eventually outlawed in Spain. Eliot's depiction of the converted Jew therefore is one-sided, neglecting both those conversos who converted out of genuine conviction, to worship devoutly and sincerely as Catholics, and those crypto-Jews who converted to Catholicism (sometimes on the threat of death) while secretly practicing Judaism.

This kind of flattening out of difference, this use of a single name to characterize a complicated and diverse population, was the means by which religious affiliation became overwritten in Spain by racial genealogy. I mean here that the creation of various estatutos de limpieza de sangre in thefifteenth century, prohibiting conversos from holding various offices and titles, in effect "reconverted" all New Christians to Jews, despite the fact that some were sincere Catholics and others were Marranos or crypto-Jews. All New Christians were suspected of relapsing into Judaism, and thereby all were conceived as members of a special race against which legislation was enacted. This meant that, on the basis of their Jewish ancestry, the New Christians could be prevented from assimilating into Spanish Catholic life and enjoying its privileges. In short, when those Christians who had Jewish ancestors, even as far back as several generations, began to reach the highest positions of power, in the Church, the military, and the government, the doctrine of blood was used to supersede the institution of conversion and to reinstate against Christians—of Jewish ancestry—the old laws against the Jews. "The Old Christians" were divided from "the New Christians," so that Christianity became based on family line and race, and a Christian's authenticity depended less on the sincerity of his religious convictions and practices than on how many Jewish ancestors, how many generations ago, "polluted" his blood. Father Isidor complains about Fedalma, "That maiden's blood / Is as unchristian as the leopard's"—despite her Christian education, and despite Silva's insistence that "Fedalma is a daughter of the Church—/ Has been baptized and nurtured in the faith."

The Spanish Gypsy does contain some version of this history, including, as part of the conventional English attack on the Catholic Inquisition, the odor of burning flesh, of "flames that, fed on heretics, still gape, / And must have heretics made to feed them still." But Eliot fails to make clear the conditions of crypto-Judaic life in the fifteenth century, including the dangers that crypto-Jews suffered to preserve their ancestral faith and heritage when the Inquisition made returning to the faith of Judaism virtually impossible. The Inquisition initially was aimed at those converted Jews who were suspected of secretly performing Judaic rituals; from 1485 until 1500, more than 99 percent of the cases that came before the Spanish Inquisition concerned converted Jews. The institution of the Inquisition crystallized the dilemma of the ideology of conversion by seeking to destroy what the missionary effort had produced. Eliot understood the historical reasons behind this system of destruction, including the economic ones, so that The Spanish Gypsy depicts characters callously arguing over whether a live Jew or "a well-burnt Jew" would most benefit the pocket of the Church's bishops or the nation's merchants. Indeed, she even recognizes that the term "Marrano" became a slur by which all conversos were stigmatized as Jews, and thereby she understands how sincere converts were libeled by the slanderous epithet "Jew": "The 'old Christians' learned to use the word [Marrano] as a term of contempt for the 'new Christians,' or converted Jews and their descendants; but not too monotonously, for they often interchanged it with the fine old crusted opprobrium of the name Jew." But such an apparently philo-Semitic view is part of a traditional argument that in effect did not sympathize with Jewish persecution but with sincere converts to Christianity who were stigmatized as Jews. In The Spanish Gypsy, then, we have a late development in the historiography of the Spanish Inquisition in England: an anti-Catholic attack that in fact includes the representation of the Jews under the Inquisition, but that understands the Jewish convert in an entirely unsympathetic light. The Spanish Gypsy's horror of conversion (at least in part fueled by Eliot's knowledge of the consequences of Christian proselytism in fifteenth-century Spain) contributes to the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jewish convert as hypocrite and opportunist, a figure reborn in the pages of Trollope's novels and in the anti-Semitic attack aimed at English converts like Disraeli.

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Where No Man Praised: The Retreat from Fame in George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy