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Messianism, Machismo, and “Marranism”: The Case of Abraham Miguel Cardoso

BRUCE ROSENSTOCK

I use
“marranism”
in my title partly for sheer alliteration, but also to draw at- tention to the term’s deprecatory significance (“pig” in Spanish). It was first used, some argue, by converted Jews (
Cristianos Nuevos
) in fifteenth-century Spain to distance themselves from other former Jews who privately held on to traditional practices, such as refraining from eating pork. (For evidence about the history of
marrano
see Caro Baroja 1962:1:383–84.) It became in time the term used by Old Christians to distance themselves from all the New Chris- tians, whatever their private adherence to Jewish ritual and belief. However, the distance between Old and New Christians could, in any individual case, disappear rapidly if an inquisitorial process discovered that one or another of one’s ancestors had been a Jew. Such processes could be initiated against any- one at any moment upon the least suspicion of “Judaizing.” Because of this inescapable threat, the term
marrano
was freighted with abjection and loathing. I will not use the term, then, as if it were neutral (as, for example, in Netanyahu 1995) but will use instead the term
converso
to refer to a New Christian who himself converted from Judaism or one of whose not-too- distant forebears was a convert. And in describing those conversos who saw themselves as in some way duplicitously Christian yet “truly” Jewish, I will use the term
crypto-Jews.
I do not presume that the term
Jew
when used in the phrase “crypto-Jew” refers to a stable identity that is veiled by a Christian mask. The story I want to tell, in fact, is about one seventeenth-century con- verso and crypto-Jew, Abraham Miguel Cardoso, and his rather tortured quest for just such a stable identity.

Abraham Miguel Cardoso was born to a crypto-Jewish family living in Rio Seco, Spain, in the year 1626. He left Spain with his older brother Isaac in

1. Abraham Cardoso has usually been discussed within the larger context of the Sabbatian movement, where he served as one of its major theoreticians.
   2
   

   The Sabbatian movement has its origin in the messianic fervor that swept through the entire Jewish world in 1665 when a charismatic fi e named Sab- batai Zevi (b. 1626 in Izmir) allowed himself to be hailed as the Messiah by a brilliant young kabbalist, Nathan of Gaza, who assumed the role of Zevi’s self- appointed prophet. The widespread messianic enthusiasm around Sabbatai Zevi came to an abrupt end when, arrested for “sedition” by Ottoman authorities and offered a choice between death and conversion to Islam, Sabbatai Zevi “donned the turban” in September 1666. Sabbatai Zevi lived in exile in Alba- nia until his death in 1676, during which time Nathan of Gaza and then Abra- ham Cardoso began to develop their kabbalistic interpretation of Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion as the penultimate stage in the full unveiling of his messianic po- tency. There were quite a few Jews from both rabbinic and lay circles who con- tinued to maintain their faith in the apostate messiah, although they generally concealed this fact under a mask of Jewish orthodoxy, and less frequently under a mask of Islamic orthodoxy after having followed the precedent of conversion set by their messiah. Many Sabbatians were, like Abraham Cardoso, Sephardim of converso backgrounds who saw the conversion of Sabbatai Zevi as parallel- ing their own experience in Spain of dissimulating their Jewish identities under cover of an alien religion. Although the broad popular appeal of Sabbatai Zevi lasted only about a year, the messianic movement that continued as an under- ground phenomenon within Judaism was of profound signifi Gershom Scholem’s magisterial study of the origin of and early history of Sabbatianism,
   Sabbatai S
   .
   evi: The Mystical Messiah
   (1973), argues that this movement, with its unprecedented challenge to the medieval structures of authority and belief that had constituted traditional rabbinic Judaism, inaugurates Jewish modernity.
   

   Until his death in 1706, Abraham Cardoso tirelessly sought to promote a new Jewish theology whose starting point was the messiahship of Sabbatai Zevi. Cardoso found himself almost constantly under attack by the rabbini- cal authorities in the cities where he tried to settle with his family, although he sometimes found local non-Jewish authorities who would offer him pro- tection. He served for some time as the personal physician to the bey of Tripoli and later to the local potentate in Tunis. In the last decades of his life, after the death of Sabbatai Zevi, he engaged with other leading Sabbatians in bitter debates about the “divinity” of the Messiah. Cardoso rejected whole- heartedly what he saw as an adoption of a Christian messialogy on the part of these Sabbatians.
   3
   Besides the numerous treatises he wrote under his own name, Cardoso is now generally thought to have penned the only work tradi- tionally attributed to Sabbatai Zevi, a lengthy kabbalistic examination of the nature of the Godhead (see Liebes 1980, 1981).
   

   In the final two sections of the essay I will explore in greater detail the conception of the Messiah with which Cardoso sought to define the Sab- batian movement of the last quarter of the seventeenth century. I will con- centrate on Cardoso’s belief that Sabbatai Zevi fulfilled only one of two messianic roles in traditional Jewish eschatological thinking (as the Messi- ah descended from David) and that he himself fulfilled the second one (as the Messiah descended from Ephraim, one of Joseph’s two sons, the one most closely associated with the non-Judahite tribes). Cardoso declared that the unification of the two Messiahs would be the final act in the un- folding messianic drama, and the terms in which he imagined this unifica- tion were unabashedly sexual. Cardoso’s messianism was informed by what I shall call “phallic narcissism,” borrowing the label from Wilhelm Reich, who applied it to men who fantasized themselves to be “erectively super- potent” (1973:164). The image of the “coronated” phallus dominates Car- doso’s messianic fantasy (for a full exposition of the image of the coronat- ed divine phallus in Kabbalah, see Wolfson 1994:336–45 and passim). Cardoso sees himself as the human analog of the
   sefirah Yesod
   , the divine phallus, within the kabbalistic representation of the revealed Godhead as a divine anthropos composed of crown, head, trunk, limbs and sex organ, the “foundation” (Yesod) of the “fullness” (pleroma) of the ten elements (
   se- firot
   ) constituting the anthropos.
   

   Although Cardoso draws upon long-standing kabbalistic imagery in his messianic self-identification, I will argue that his kabbalistic training alone cannot account for the shape of Cardoso’s messianism. We need to see Car- doso’s messianism against the background of the lived experience of the con- verso and crypto-Jew in the Iberian peninsula during the period, following 1492, when Spain was attempting to define a homogeneous national identi- ty. After sketching Stephen Gilman’s pathbreaking work on converso identi- ties, I will argue that the lived experience of the converso can best be under- stood as part of a cultural formation closely paralleling what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as the “double bind” imposed by the heterosexual regime of modern bourgeois society, with the Jew occupying the space of the homo- sexual. I will also argue that the converso is subject to the same kind of psy- chic pressure Frantz Fanon describes in relation to the black colonial subject. In the case of Abraham Cardoso the psychosocial dynamic, which played it- self out in the life of the converso, results in a narcissistic counterformation that finds its embodiment in the sexual symbology of the Kabbalah. I will conclude this essay by sketching some of the implications of the case of Abra- ham Cardoso for our understanding of the intersection of European Jewish
   

   history and the construction of heterosexuality, the relationship between Kab- balah and phallic narcissism, and, finally, the relevance of the converso and crypto-Jew for reflections on postmodernity.