Exiles in Sepharad by Jeffrey Gorsky

Author:Jeffrey Gorsky [Gorsky, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS022000 History / Jewish
ISBN: 9780827612396
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2015-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

The epithet at the end of the verse, puto judío, is a generic insult, not an imputation of homosexuality; it was, moreover, the worst insult in the language. As one modern academic, Barbara Weissberger, in the book Queer Iberia, explains: “Behind the sodomite, bearer of pestilence, is the outline of the converso. They are joined in the worst popular insult that could be hurled: ‘faggot Jew!’”20 “The English translation of ‘puto judío’ cannot fully convey the pejorative sense of this masculinization of ‘puta,’ which figures the Jewish male subject both as a whore and as the passive partner in the homosexual act.”21 The poem ends with a chilling prediction of the soon-to-be-established auto-da-fé, in which thousands of conversos would be burned at the stake. Montoro asks Queen Isabella that if she must burn conversos, to do so at Christmastime, when the warmth of the fire will be better appreciated.

Montoro himself managed to evade the Inquisition: he died soon after writing the poem, probably before the Inquisition had come into force. He showed his lack of respect for the church by leaving it only a nominal sum in his will. His wife was not as fortunate: she was burned as a heretic sometime before April 1487.22

The poems of Anton de Montoro represent both a creative dead end and a harbinger of more important art. By 1480 and the imposition of the Spanish Inquisition and “purity of blood” laws, conversos could no longer like Montoro proudly proclaim their Jewish roots. Such an attitude would have resulted in death by fire for heresy. The nineteenth-century Spanish historian Amador de los Ríos has said that Montoro “seemed to be boasting of his sambenito,” the punishment that would be inflicted on conversos by the Inquisition.23

Instead, converso writers would turn to secrecy and indirection. It is no coincidence that the two most important works by conversos, La Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes (both classics of world literature), were both first published anonymously. But Montoro also pioneered some of the same attitudes and devices that would mark works of later converso artists. Irony, irreverence, and the use of low-class characters to attack the pretensions of the higher classes would soon inspire a much more important genre. Picaresque literature came out of the cancionero tradition.24 The picaresque novel, in its turn, was to become part of the foundation of modern literature.

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