Book Reviews 121
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Book Reviews 121 Norman Simms, Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience, Peter Lang, New York, 2006, pp. 142, ISBN: 0-8204-8120-3. Review doi: 10.1558/arsr.v23i1.121. Read backwards, this exciting work is an investigation into the madness of the Spanish poet Miguel de Barrios (1635–1705). Numerous commentators have considered the lives of de Barrios for he was both, and at the same time, a notable literary gure among the Sephardic Jews of Protestant Amsterdam, and an ofcer in the army of his most Catholic Majesty in the Spanish possession of Brussels. In the mirror that is a regular motif of Simms’s book, de Barrios is much more. He is rst a man who, escaping into North Africa from the Spain of the Inquisition, declared himself Daniel Levi (de Barrios’s Jewish name), and, while still young, joined a failed attempt to establish a Jewish community in the West Indies: the New World being yet another chance at fashioning a new self. The failed venture and his return to Europe represented de Barrios’ failure to establish a singular identity, so instead he signed up, in the guise of his former self as a New Christian and did this in order to serve in the army of the Spanish emperor in the Netherlands. The religious tolerance of nearby Amsterdam allowed him the freedom to become a celebrated poet among the Jewish community there, albeit one who celebrated pagan classical ideals a little too fervently for his co-religionists. Subsequent to this stage of his life where he worked as a good Catholic soldier and a Jewish poet, de Barrios sought to resolve his identity crisis one last time as a fervid disciple of the ‘messiah’ Sabbatai Zevi. From this point a certain madness descended upon the man. Simms adds, When a fuzzy Jew looked into the mirror, he or she saw reected back a mask, if he or she looked long and hard enough, a concatenation of masks, none of which he or she could be sure was the face he or she hoped was his or her own (p. 114). In seeking to bring the reader into the deepest possible understanding of the experience of being a crypto-Jew, Simms uses a number of startling devices, including musical analogies such as, [the pizmon or praise song] is traditionally drawn from popular Arab compositions, often about erotic love, and transforms them by new Hebrew words that echo sounds of the original texts turning them into sacred, liturgical music. Using this model, Simms shows how de Barrios was able to construct his poetry weaving Classical, Catholic and Jewish themes, often secretly, allowing aspects of himself to be read in particular ways by the different communities he inhabited. It is here that we begin to source the general direction of Simms’s book: how did this multiplicity of masks permit crypto-Jews to think?; how did they deal with the trauma of Jewish persecution in Spain?; and how did they psychologically hide their religion in a newly homogenized Catholic homeland and develop structures of self and of culture? De Barrios’ birth in Cordoba in 1634 conrms what many Inquisition transcripts and intercepted letters demonstrate: that New Christians were carrying on their Jewish religion in secret in some way, but Simms, who writes from the perspective of an historian of mentalities, faces a serious lack of sources and freely admits this. From this admission the author is able to summon more innovative strategies to try to reclaim what history has so far denied us. The rst is to assess possible results of having the roles of men in a Jewish family re-aligned. As New Christians, crypto-Jewish men had to give up their roles at © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010. 122 ARSR 23.1 (2010) yeshivas and in the synagogue, and women carried a new importance as transmitters of the older, secret and now wholly domestic faith, […] the change from male to female domination was a humiliating situation for the men, made worse insofar as the male had also to live a public life in terms of his Christian and Spanish identity, with all the macho and aristocratic grandeur that this implied. The humiliated male, no matter how far he could repress his insulted manhood and hidalgo pride, must have felt a need— deeply unconscious, for the most part—to assert himself over the rest of the household in terms again that are all too familiar from modern clinical evidence of abusive males (p. 43). Systematically, Simms continues to investigate the possible psychological challenges that crypto-Jewish women and children would have to have faced. In the rst generation of conversion, he suggests, the effects on the family would have been akin to the results from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as we know it through modern studies. In subsequent generations, because of both the need to keep a tradition and keep it secret there would have been a ‘[…] shared awareness of pain, or even a pain without awareness of why it is there or that it is shared’ (p. 57). The model of distress that Simms devises then nds conrmation in some powerful cultural works including Spain’s greatest novel: Whereas Ann J. Cruz takes Cervantes’ book, with its ‘propensity for changing names and naming changes simultaneously’ as a reection of ‘seventeenth- century Spain’s anxieties about the arbitrary nature of language’, it is probably more apt to see these tendencies as marking Don Quixote as a converso romance, and the hero as a Marrano (p. 60). Indeed Quixote does lead a twisted double life in understanding reality: How does this come about? I hope the author will go more into this at a later stage. The great challenge to Simms’s book, however, is in the way the author struggles to imagine the effect of crypto-Jewishness on children. He admits he has very little to go on, but again makes suppositions based on modern understandings of stress and trauma in family situations. Yet even further to this suffering in the victim of the violent event and the ongoing consequences in their individual lives, these persons pass on somatic memories of the abuse to their children, partly through the alterations in blood chemistry transferred to the unborn child, partly through the effects of the hormonal changes to the foetus in the womb or in nursing brought on by the dysfunctional mother–infant gaze-bonding (p. 78). Some pragmatic historians will nd Simms’s methodologies controversial but this is a work that clearly advances the study of religion into the realm of psychohistory and, at every stage, Simms reminds the reader of the difculty of studying in an area shrouded by secrecy, something many of us who look at oblique religious societies must consider. Similarly, one might argue that the anachronistic application of modern psychological conditions such as PTSD to crypto-Jews in age of the reconquista and Inquisition assumes that such conditions are universal to the human condition whereas they may not be. Simms’s methodology is worth careful consideration. For example, some excellent scholarship has emerged recently on the social trauma encountered by Protestants who remained in France during the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Catholic agents preyed upon Protestants, removed their children and effected a similar kind of community trauma. This area could benet from a consideration of Simms’s approach. Just as © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010. Book Reviews 123 importantly, Simms shows how a new kind of split in the understanding of selfhood came at this time, with individuals fashioning themselves for one reality at home, and another publicly. The author touches on how this division can be read into the works of de Barrios, and even Don Quixote, but much more work could be done by scholars of literature and historians of ideas to see how widely this powerful division in the self challenged and reformed prevailing ideas of selfhood at this time. Simms is careful to consider all aspects of the life of a Marrano or converted Jew—to this extent his book is a bold challenge to historians working in the eld of comparative mentalities, Jewish and Spanish history—and Simms’s repeated assessment of the place of women in the homes of New Christians also makes this book of deep interest to those considering the way in which women can be written more fully into history. Christopher Hartney University of Sydney © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010. .