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THE CONVERSO and the SPANISH PICARESQUE NOVEL Deborah Skolnik Rosenberg the Spanish Picaresque Novel Begins to Flourish a Little

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THE CONVERSO and the SPANISH PICARESQUE NOVEL Deborah Skolnik Rosenberg the Spanish Picaresque Novel Begins to Flourish a Little THE CONVERSO AND THE SPANISH PICARESQUE NOVEL Deborah Skolnik Rosenberg The Spanish picaresque novel begins to flourish a little more than a cen- tury after the last Jews either converted or left Spain in the wake of the 1492 Edict of Expulsion. Following the publication of Lazarillo de Tormes in 1554, subsequent picaresque works do not appear until the late 1500s. The success of the Guzmán de Alfarache (Part I: 1559, Part II: 1604), which had twenty-six editions of its fijirst part in the fijive years after publication, led to around twenty picaresque works over the next few decades. The picaresque took many forms during this period, including “traditional” pícaros in the vein of Guzmán, female pícaras such as Justina of the Libro del entretenimiento de la pícara Justina (1605) and Elena of La ingeniosa Elena, hija de la Celestina (1614), or the pious hero of La vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón (1618).1 The same years of the picaresque trajectory marked the culmination of centuries of radical change for conversos, those descendants of Jews who had converted to Catholicism in previous generations.2 No individuals openly practiced Judaism in Spain any longer, and the conversos formed a group that had relinquished their ancestral religion at various historical moments of tragedy. Many Jewish families had decided to convert during a marked rise in violence against them in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Christians blamed Jews for the Black Death that plagued the Iberian peninsula in the 1300s and accused them of murdering Christian children to use their blood in ritualistic ceremonies. The Seville riots in the summer of 1391, when around four thousand Jews were murdered, led to further violence throughout Andalusia, Castile, and Aragon. Many of 1 La ingeniosa Elena was published in a shorter version in 1612. 2 Scholars from diffferent disciplines employ various terms to refer to the converts from Judaism to Christianity and their descendants; I have chosen “converso” because it is the most common and neutral term used by literary scholars today. Some other terms trans- mit derogatory connotations that I do not wish to perpetuate, such as the probable refer- ence to swine in the term “marrano.” Judaic scholars often use “anusim,” a Hebrew word meaning “coerced ones,” yet this term is not generally used by scholars of Spanish litera- ture. Although many converts from Islam and their descendants also inhabited early mod- ern Spain, historical and scholarly usage diffferentiates the term for converts from Judaism as “conversos” and the term for converts from Islam as “moriscos.” 184 deborah skolnik rosenberg the Jews who escaped harm chose conversion to avoid more problems, while ecclesiastic campaigns in the late fourteenth and early fijifteenth centuries caused other Jews to convert to Catholicism. Jews and conversos weathered additional bouts of violence in the fijif- teenth century, both from continued anti-Semitic riots against Jews—as in the Toledo uprisings of 1449—or the punishment and execution of con- versos charged with Judaizing by the Inquisition after its establishment in Spain in 1478. Those Jews who had not yet converted encountered increas- ing societal obstacles to their coexistence with Christians, as laws com- pelling Jews to live in separate quarters were enforced in the late 1400s. The Edict of Expulsion signed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella on March 31, 1492, attempted to eradicate Jewish practice completely in the pursuit of religious cohesion and economic profijit after the Reconquest. It decreed that all Jews must either convert or leave Castile and Aragon within four months. Estimates of the numbers of Jews and conversos in Spain on the eve of the Expulsion vary widely. Historians approximate that the converso population already numbered around 225,000 to 600,000 before 1492. They estimate that from 40,000 to more than 1,000,000 non- converted Jews chose to leave Spain after the Edict, mostly for Portugal or Northern Africa, and they place the numbers of converts in 1492 anywhere from 20,000 to 240,000. In any case, even using the most conservative fijig- ures we can conjecture that at least about a quarter million converts from Judaism to Catholicism lived in Spain at the beginning of the sixteenth century among a general population that totaled seven to nine million.3 By the time that the picaresque novel became popular, then, conversos had lived for more than one hundred years without any Jewish neighbors. Many converso families had assimilated into mainstream Spanish society, achieving important posts in the government and Church or titles of nobility, despite laws that discouraged these positions of power. Most conversos in the late 1500s practiced Catholicism with no vestigial ties to 3 See David M. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society, 1996), 73–80 for an overview of scholarly estimates on the converso and Jewish populations in Spain at the time of the Expulsion. Gitlitz believes that the most reliable numbers culled from the historical scholarship are: 225,000 conversos in pre-1492 Spain; 100,000–160,000 Jews expelled in 1492; and 25,000–50,000 Jews converted in 1492. See also Haim Beinart, The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 284–90 for analysis of contemporary historical accounts of the number of Jews expelled, and Appendix B, “Jewish and Converso Population in Fifteenth-Century Spain” in Norman Roth, Converso, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 328–32..
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