From New Christians to New Jews: Seventeenth-Century Spanish Texts in Defense of Judaism

In From New Christians to New Jews: Seventeenth-Century Spanish Texts in Defense of Judaism, Matthew D. Warshawsky studies diasporic New Christian authors of the 1600s and early 1700s to show how emergent or "New" Jews used literary language of Catholic Spain to communicate their experiences as conversos and, to varying degrees, former conversos. In six essays, the works of Isaac Orobio de Castro, Jo緌 Pinto Delgado, Antonio Enr甒uez G鏔ez, Isaac Cardoso, Miguel de Barrios, and Daniel Israel L鏕ez Laguna are analyzed, positioning the authors as Iberian and Jewish at a time when the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions prevented such identities from coexisting openly. The influences of these men's upbringings in a religiously inflexible society are reflected through works that span open advocacy of Judaism to laments about injustice and suffering.

In the study of these texts, Warshawsky argues for greater recognition of their authors as exemplars of early modern transatlantic literature, whether they wrote letters and polemics common to religious debates, poetry whose genres typified the Spanish Baroque, including sonnets, epic poems, and narrative ballads, or an allegorical play that affirms not the Eucharist, but Judaism. Situating these texts as works of Baroque Spanish literature written outside the Inquisitorial sphere but reflective of its impact, From New Christians to New Jews shows how each author created an emergent Jewish sense of self, rooted in their knowledge of Spanish literary practices and of the Inquisitorial societies from which they came. That they did so across a wide geographical landscape and despite the eclipse of Judaism in Iberian lands at that time testifies to the reach and cohesiveness of this identity.