Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (38 page)

The messianism of Abraham Miguel Cardoso reveals in an extreme form some of the consequences of the lived experience of the converso. Sedgwick’s analysis of the response of some homosexuals to the closet provides an insight into Cardoso’s case. Sedgwick (1990:68) describes the “utopian” impulse in some writing by homosexuals. In utopian writing, the author offers a histor- ical narrative that has “as a fulcrum a saving vision—whether located in past or future—of its [i.e., history’s] apocalyptic rupture.” In the case of the crypto- Jews, and of many Christian-identified conversos as well, the utopian re- sponse was linked with a hope for messianic redemption, often sensed as im- manent.
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It is first of all within the context of the utopian response to the converso situation that we must place Abraham Cardoso’s messianism. When in 1665 Sabbatai Zevi declared himself to be the Messiah and most of the Jewish world was swept up in eschatological fervor, Cardoso, like many other former crypto-Jews,
22
believed that their utopian dreams were being realized. What happened on September 15, 1666, at the court of Ottoman sultan in Adrianople radically altered the nature of those dreams. The hope was that Sabbatai Zevi would persuade the sultan to accept his messianic claims. How- ever, as I have already mentioned, when Sabbatai Zevi emerged from his meeting with the sultan’s officials, he had converted to Islam, although he continued to proclaim himself the now “occulted” Messiah of Israel.

Some of those who wished to remain true to their belief that the messianic age had been inaugurated with Sabbatai Zevi decided to follow the lead of their messiah and join him in apostasy. Others took a more moderate course, considering Sabbatai Zevi’s apostasy to be a unique act that was not intended to be a model for others. The most prominent spokesperson for this position was Abraham Miguel Cardoso. Scholem saw in Cardoso’s continued alle- giance to Sabbatai Zevi an example of the attraction that a “hidden” messiah had on former crypto-Jews who themselves may have spent a considerable part of their own lives in hiding their real identities (see especially Scholem 1971b:95). For Cardoso, at least, the messiah’s apostasy was not an act he sought to emulate.

Cardoso set out to define the theory and practice of the Sabbatian faith by downplaying the apostasy and the image of a debased messiah. Cardoso’s Jewish triumphalist messianism—he believed that Israel’s redemption would mean the acknowledgment by both Christianity and Islam that their “revela- tions” were utterly without merit—could not countenance the centrality of a debased messiah, nor the practice of self-debasement through apostasy that some Sabbatians adopted in imitation of Sabbatai Zevi. Cardoso was fully

aware of how closely the image of the debased messiah resembled that of the Christian messiah.
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Although he was not afraid to use the “suffering servant” passage in Isaiah 53 as a proof text for the messianic status of the debased Sab- batai Zevi, he sought to distinguish Sabbatai Zevi’s debasement from that of Jesus by claiming that Sabbatai Zevi would not die in a condition of debase- ment as Jesus had: “And we say that between the abasement and the glory of the Messiah son of David, there must be no death, for the Messiah son of David does not have to die” (from an unpublished manuscript of a letter of Abraham Cardoso to his brother, quoted in Yerushalmi 1971:337). When in fact Sabbatai Zevi died in 1676 without having emerged in glory from his apostasy, Cardoso developed a theory about two Messiahs, one the descen- dant of David, the other the descendant of Ephraim, Joseph’s youngest child. (He is also sometimes spoken of as the Messiah son of Joseph, Ephraim’s fa- ther. Cardoso prefers the designation, “Messiah son of Ephraim.”) Cardoso identified the Messiah son of David with Sabbatai Zevi and the Messiah son of Ephraim with himself.
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Cardoso, having grown up in a condition of humiliation and self- occultation, could not countenance the centrality of a humiliated and occult- ed Messiah. This is why he fastened upon the Jewish teaching concerning two Messiahs, one the descendant of David, the other the descendant of Ephraim.
25
Cardoso makes this clear in a treatise (
drush
) entitled “Israel was holy to the Lord, the first fruits of his harvest” (Jeremiah 2:3), which we will refer to hereafter as
Qodesh Yisra’el
. This text mentions the death of Sabbatai Zevi (1676), and yet it reveals a heightened expectation of the cessation of Is- rael’s exile (
galut
). In
‘al HaHamarah be-Saloniki
(278),
26
Cardoso tells us that in 1680 he and his students began to look forward to an immanent end to the exile, and as Passover of the year 1682 approached they had great hopes that the festival would not pass without the coming of redemption (p. 281). It is therefore reasonable to accept Scholem’s dating of the text to some time dur- ing this two-year period, and certainly before the mass apostasy of the Sabba- tians in Saloniki in the year 1683, an event that devastated Cardoso and closed the book on his hopes for an immanent redemption.

In
Qodesh Yisra’el
Cardoso plays with acronyms derived from the first and final letters of several Biblical phrases, as well as of the phrases “Messi- ah son of David” and “Messiah son of Ephraim” (
Mashiah
ben David and
Mashiah
ben ’Efrayim, respectively). At one point Cardoso equates the se- quence of Hebrew letters “mem, bet, alef ” of “Messiah son of Ephraim” with that of “Michael son of Abraham,” his own name. He goes on to declare that he possesses something like a divine “nickname,”
r’oshiy
, “my head,” also the name of a sort of supernal “alter ego” of Cardoso who appears to him as his

spiritual “guide” (
maggid
). This nickname is fraught with kabbalistic signif- icance. Central to the Kabbalah is the notion that the unitary divine person unfolds or reveals itself in ten divine configurations, each called a sefirah. Some of these configurations are male and others are female. Together they embody a single divine person. There is, however, a fissure within this di- vine realm that is reflected in the exile of Israel from its home. Kabbalistic practices were intended to remedy the fissure and bring about either the mystic’s or communal Israel’s redemption, or both. In the next section I will discuss one such practice introduced by Cardoso. Here I want to concen- trate on Cardoso’s kabbalistic nickname and its importance for his messian- ic self-understanding.

In the context in which Cardoso introduces the name and in his further discussion of it, it is clear, as I will demonstrate, that the name is connected with the sefirah of Yesod, the divine phallus. Cardoso explains that the con- sonants of this name can be found in the first word of the Hebrew Bible,
ber’eshiyt
, “In the beginning [of ].” The first name of the Messiah son of David, Sabbatai (
Shabtay
), may also be found in this word, but one must re- arrange the letters. In other words, the nickname of Cardoso is written “in order” within the first word of the Bible, whereas that of Sabbatai Zevi is found “out of order.” In a passage of tremendous significance for an under- standing of Cardoso’s self-image, he explains why this should be so:

Consider that
r’oshiy
is the head [
r’osh
] of the tenth
sefirah
and this pours out in a straight line upon
Malkhut
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and for this reason the letters of
r’oshiy
are in a straight line and clearly visible in the word
ber’eshiyt
. Re- maining over from the word are the letters
b
[
bet
]
t
[
tav
] and she [
bat
means daughter] is
Malkhut
. Because it [
r’oshiy
] is from
Yesod
[the ninth
sefirah
, the divine phallus], it is a “speculum which shines” and its name shines in the light of the word
ber’eshiyt
. And because the Messiah son of David is from
Malkhut
,
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and
Malkhut
is a “speculum which does not shine,” his deeds are hidden and his name is not in order in the letters of the word
ber’eshiyt
. And likewise at the end of the Torah, in the word
Yis- ra’el
,
r’oshiy
is found, but not in order, because he too [i.e., Cardoso] will come to be within Israel in a state of confusion.

Cardoso identifies himself as the Messiah son of Ephraim, a figure whom he associates with Yesod, the divine phallus, within the configurations of the sefirot.
29
Cardoso’s divine nickname,
r’oshiy
, is contained within the first word of the Hebrew Bible,
ber’eshiyt
, and the letters that surround his name make up the word
bat
, “daughter,” referring to the sefirah of
Malkhut
, aligned with

the Messiah son of David, Sabbatai Zevi. Although we must return to this point later, it is important to note now that we have in this explication of the first word of the Hebrew Bible a representation of the penetration of the male sefirah of Yesod within the space of the female Malkhut and, at the same time, the representation of the union of the two Messiahs. This union is in fact the focus of Cardoso’s text
Qodesh Yisra’el
. What Cardoso wants to stress in the passage just quoted, however, is that he, Cardoso, is the “straight” version of the Messiah, whereas Sabbatai Zevi is the “out-of-order” version. In a passage immediately following the one we have quoted, Cardoso explains that his own messianic task consists in offering a clearer, more legible, rendering of the Messiah’s message concerning the “mystery of the faith.”
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And what is the mystery of the faith that Cardoso will reveal to Israel and humanity? It is, in a word, that the divine Person has both a male and female identity. This truth has been obscured, according to Cardoso, by the “turn to philosophy” in Israel’s history, the preeminence of the Maimonidean concept of a suprapersonal, wholly absract deity. The God of the philosophers is the First Cause, but the God of Israel is a divine Person who emanated from the First Cause and who is the unifying force inhering within the confi of the ten sefi ot, but especially within the male confi of
Tiferet
, called the Holy One Blessed Be He, and the female confi of Malkhut, also called the
Shekhinah
. At the heart of Cardoso’s complex vision of the investiture of the unifying power within the sefi otic confi is the idea that Israel’s God stands revealed in the joining of male and female confi within the em- anated pleroma, and that the undifferentiated unity of the First Cause plays no role in Israel’s history, or indeed in the world’s history. The First Cause did not create the material cosmos, and it has no providential relation with humanity or, more particularly, with Israel. But the rabbis, seduced by philosophy and its worship of abstract unity, have forsaken the knowledge of God and his unity with his Shekhinah in favor of the worship of the First Cause.

Cardoso claims that as the Messiah son of Ephraim he has risen beyond Sabbatai Zevi, the Messiah son of David, in knowledge and redemptive power. Unlike the Messiah son of David, Cardoso says that he does not need to pass through the humiliation of self-concealment, since he was born into that condition. Rather, as Messiah son of Ephraim his task is to openly de- clare the immanent end of Israel’s exile and to prepare Israel to assume its rightful place as chief among the nations. Cardoso uses the notion of the Mes- siah son of Ephraim to get beyond the focus on an apostasizing and humili- ated Messiah. But the duality of the Messiahs is not something Cardoso can accept as final, since it represents the inevitability of concealment and humil- iation within the role of the Messiah, and, for Cardoso the former crypto-Jew,

this means that there is no getting beyond the humiliations of the closet. Car- doso audaciously declares therefore that he and Sabbatai Zevi will become, in the world of redemption, a single figure. How this unification of the two sides of the Messiah will take place—how, in other words, the final triumph over a bifurcated identity, and over all the humiliation it entails, is to be achieved is what I want to focus on for the remainder of the essay.

In discussing the unity of the two Messiahs, Cardoso draws upon the lan- guage and themes of the Kabbalah. Cardoso believed that if the two Messiahs could be united the fissure between the male and female configurations (se- firot) would be healed, and Israel redeemed. According to Cardoso, the ulti- mate union of the two Messiahs mirrors the union of the male sefirah of Yesod, the divine phallus, and the female sefirah of Malkhut, sometimes re- ferred to as the Shekhinah. In ecstatic Kabbalah, as Elliot Wolfson (1994 pas- sim and 1995) has amply shown, the mystic seeks a vision of the union of the Holy One Blessed Be He, and his Shekhinah that is described in overtly sex- ual terms and translates into the more concentrated image of the “crowned phallus” of the Godhead, the conjunction of the sefirot of Yesod and Malkhut. When the phallus is crowned (imagined as the unveiling of the co- rona of the phallus), the female has been rejoined to male and their unity is complete, even though it means the effacement of the separate identity of the female and her absorption into the male as the corona of the phallus.

When Cardoso speaks of the unity of the two Messiahs, he adopts precisely this figure, the crowned phallus, to represent it, with himself assuming the identity of the phallus, and Sabbatai Zevi that of the corona. In one particu- larly revealing ritual of reparation (
tiqqun
) that Cardoso details in
Qodesh Yis- ra’el
, we find the erotics of ecstatic Kabbalah redirected toward the union of Cardoso and Sabbatai Zevi. The ritual involves the lifting up and joining to- gether of a palm branch and a pomegranate. Cardoso says that the palm, whose fruit is “perfect,” having both stamens and pistil, represents himself, the Mes- siah son of Ephraim, and his union with his “female half,” Sabbatai Zevi, the Messiah son of David. And the pomegranate fruit with its green crown is the symbol of the royal, Davidic Messiah. But the pomegranate is also the symbol of the Messiah son of Ephraim because the seed-bearing fruit is like the phal- lus. And there is another reason why the pomegranate can represent the Mes- siah son of Ephraim. Cardoso explains: “
Yesod
possesses a crown [the corona of the phallus], and in this respect
Yesod
is a pomegranate.” With this explanation

we see that the pomegranate symbolizes each Messiah, in turn, and their unity: the pomegranate’s crown symbolizes the Messiah son of David, and the fruit symbolizes the Messiah son of Ephraim. The crown and the fruit, in turn, sym- bolize the crowned phallus, and this is the image of the union of Yesod and Malkhut. Sabbatai Zevi and Cardoso are, in their unity, likened to the union of the male and female configurations of the divine pleroma.

The image of the two Messiahs united as a coronated phallus undoubt- edly plays a significant role in Cardoso’s psychic economy, suggesting as it does a large measure of narcissistic fantasy regarding his own masculinity. We have already described the Manichaean delirium of Iberian culture that imag- ined Jewish blood to be the carrier of effeminizing corruption. Cardoso’s mes- sianic self-presentation reverses the assault on his own Jewish identity, turn- ing him into the human analog of the divine phallus. Cardoso’s phallic narcissism has a decidedly homoerotic tinge to it, since it is connected to his union with Sabbatai Zevi. However, this union is really the final reparation of the occluded phallus that has not yet been “crowned.” The union with Sab- batai Zevi is not so much imagined to be a sexual act with a separate partner as an autoerotic demonstration of virile potency. As Wolfson has pointed out in reference to the question of the homoerotic element in Kabbalah where the mystic brotherhood is identified with God’s phallic corona, what we are real- ly dealing with is narcissistic autoeroticism:

The righteous souls [of the mystics] in whom God delights are the fruits of his own labor and indeed his own sons who are in his image. Taking delight in the righteous mystics who study Torah is tantamount to God taking delight in himself. The erotic bond between God and the right- eous, therefore, is not incestuous, but narcissistic: God’s love of the right- eous is an expression of self-love. God delights in his own image reflect- ed in the faces of the mystics even as the mystics delight in their own image reflected in the face of God. From this perspective, moreover, it can be said the homoeroticism is an aspect of divine autoeroticism.

(1997:170–71)

Cardoso inserts himself into the circuit of this divine autoeroticism, effac- ing the difference between himself and the divine phallus. We may even go so far as to say that Cardoso’s fantasy emerges as a result of anxieties centered around the integrity of his penis. We may see evidence of this in Cardoso’s ex- traordinary testimony about a question that must have been raised about many former crypto-Jews, namely, whether they had been properly circumcised. He states (
‘iggeret Dalet
, pp. 220–222) that two women confronted him with the

charge (at the behest of Moses and Aaron who had appeared to them previ- ously and told them to go to Cardoso) that he had a “blemish” (
pegam
) on the site of his circumcision that rendered it improper, and they spread this rumor in several cities. They claimed that his blemish was hindering the coming of the Messiah and that salvation depended on his repairing the circumcision. We see here the obverse of Cardoso’s phallic narcissism, that is, the humiliation en- dured during his crypto-Jewish past and the place on his body where that past was inscribed, whether or not he had actually been circumcised. In fact, Car- doso advances in proof of his being properly circumcised the claim that his penis did truly have a “blemish” near the head of his penis caused by a faulty circumcision. The circumcision was faulty, he tells us, because he had been born without a foreskin and, after he left Spain, a mohel had removed skin un- necessarily! Whatever we may make of his claim to have been born circumcised (not medically impossible),
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what this must have meant to Cardoso was that while he may have been considered in the land of his birth to be of “impure blood” as a New Christian, as a Jew he was pure—indeed, of such a purity as to be on a plane beyond all other Jewish males (who require circumcision). But the sign of his purity is blemished by the needless intervention of a rabbinic authority who did not recognize his uniqueness and therefore demanded his submission to the ritual of circumcision.
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In light of this we may recognize in his alter ego, R’oshiy (“my head”), a projection of an idealized, unblemished (and natally circumcised) phallic selfhood.

The continuing presence of a sense of being “blemished”—somehow im- pure—is evidenced also in one further meaning that Cardoso attaches to the union of the two Messiahs. One blemish, as we have just seen, derives from having had to remove a part of skin near the head of his penis because of the (in Cardoso’s belief ) blindness of the rabbinic authority to his authentic puri- ty as a Jew. This blindness parallels the general rabbinic blindness to the “mys- tery of the faith” Cardoso is revealing to the world. Another blemish has to do with the Christian mask Cardoso was compelled to wear in his crypto-Jewish past. According to Cardoso, the union of the two Messiahs represents the uni- fication of all Israel: the house of Judah with the dispersed tribes of Joseph. This is a point Cardoso makes at the beginning and the end of
Qodesh Yisra’el
where he recalls that the lineage of the Messiah son of Ephraim goes back to the first king of the Northern Kingdom, Jeroboam son of Nebat, who is seen as the greatest idolator in Israel’s history, the one who is ultimately responsible for the dispersion of the ten northern tribes. Here again we see the obverse side of Cardoso’s messianic narcissism; he is descended from the greatest sinner in Israel’s history. However, the division between the two royal lines that began with Jeroboam will be finally ended with the union of the two Messiahs.

You have already noted the affair of Jeroboam son of Nebat and this ex- tends all the way down to the Messiah son of David and the Messiah son of Ephraim, between whom there will be conflict and jealousy until the end time, and then “Ephraim shall not be jealous of Judah, and Judah shall not harass Ephraim.”
(Isaiah 11:131 [
Qodesh Yisra’el
, p. 253])

Because of Jeroboam’s sin, Cardoso says near the end of this drush, he, Car- doso, was destined to be born in a land where he was forced to be an “idol worshiper.” By suffering the imposition of the Christain mask, Cardoso has in Christ-like fashion atoned for Israel’s sin (of idol worship). Once this sin has been atoned for, the dispersion of the ten tribes will come to an end. The hope that the ten tribes would return to Zion in the messianic age was wide- ly held by Jews and Christians alike at the time,
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and, for Cardoso, it must have meant especially the cessation of the plight of the Jews on the Iberian Peninsula. We see again how powerfully Cardoso’s experience as a crypto-Jew has shaped his imagination. His messianic task requires him to teach the Jews outside the Iberian peninsula the truth about God in order to free them from their unwitting metaphysical idolatry in worshipping the First Cause of the philosophers, and, once this has been achieved, the crypto-Jews of the Iberian peninsula will be freed from their enforced idolatry before the Cross. Clearly, one of the driving forces behind Cardoso’s messianism is his continuing iden- tification with the suffering of the crypto-Jews.
34
Cardoso transfoms his pre- vious submissive and defeated posture of enforced idolatry into a messianic act of atonement, and he projects his future triumph as the revelation of his and God’s regal “coronation” before Israel and the nations.

• • •

Cardoso’s messianic self-understanding can be seen to have its roots in his continuing sense of the profound humiliation that marked his crypto-Jewish past. Cardoso’s messianism must be understood within the framework of his phallic narcissism, the obverse side of the wounds inflicted by his experience as a crypto-Jew. The case of Abraham Miguel Cardoso reveals the powerful forces that may be generated within the closet of the insider/outsider and the trajectory that an identity may take once those forces are released.

In the earlier sections of this essay I tried to show how postexpulsion Iberian culture and the place of the converso within it could be productive- ly viewed through the combined lenses of queer theory (Sedgwick) and post- colonial theory (Fanon). Using Sedgwick we saw how the inquisitorial regu- lation of the circulation of Jewish blood in the social body paralleled the

heterosexual “terror” that regulates the circulation of homoerotic libido in bourgeois society. Fanon provided us with the basic terms with which to un- derstand Spain’s Manichaean delirium and the narcissistic face-off between Old Christian and New Christian that was sometimes its consequence. I would like in these final paragraphs to suggest some ways that the lessons de- rived from this theorization of Iberian culture and the converso can be ex- tended into other related areas of research.

First, I think that we should rethink the periodization offered by Boyarin (1997), whose work has informed this study, for the emergence of the “mus- cle Jew” and the associated homophobic revulsion in regard to the figure of the feminized Jew. “It is at this moment,” Boyarin writes about fin-de-siècle Europe, “that circumcision suddenly takes on the aspect of a displaced castra- tion” (p. 240). In another passage Boyarin explains: “The Jewish male, hav- ing been vilified for hundreds of European years as feminized, and this no longer—
after the rise of heterosexuality
—being read as a mark of resistance and honor by the ‘emancipated’ Jew, set out to reinstate himself as manly in the terms of masculinist European culture that had rejected and abused him. He sought ‘manliness’” (p. 254; emphasis added). Boyarin astutely identifies the European Jew as the colonial subject in the midst of Europe itself. In light of what we have seen in the case of Abraham Cardoso, I think we must recog- nize that the converso and crypto-Jew in early modern Spain occupy the space of the emancipated (converted) colonial subject of machismo Iberian culture. And because of this, they, like European Jews at the fin de siècle, also seek to reinstate themselves as manly in terms of Iberian machismo culture. In Car- doso’s case, as I have shown, this took the form of phallic narcissism clothed in the symbology of the Kabbalah. Furthermore, the racialization of Jewish “decadence”—a phenomenon attributed to the late nineteenth century—was fully deployed in early modern Iberian culture.

However, in the case of Cardoso circumcision is not “closeted,” as Boyarin suggests is the case for Freud and other Jews like him who felt the pressure of masculinist and racialist European culture (pp. 235–40). This leads me to my second point. Cardoso, as we have seen, declared that he was born circum- cised, and he identified himself with the divine (ontogenically circumcised) phallus. But there were many other conversos who certainly did “closet” their circumcision just as Boyarin says of Freud. Yovel (1998) points to the recur- rent motif of “outing” the circumcised converso in fifteenth-century
Can- cioneros
. What permits Cardoso to adopt another attitude to circumcision is the narcissistic eroticism that was basic to the Kabbalah’s imagery of the di- vine phallus and its coronation. For Cardoso the Kabbalah, when properly understood, was the “secret knowledge” of the engendering of the divine Per-

son, a knowledge that the Jews had possessed all along, although most had been deluded by the philosophers’ God, the First Cause.
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I would like to sug- gest that the Kabbalah did not by some happy coincidence provide Cardoso the imaginative repertoire with which to repair the wounds inflicted by the machismo narcissism of Iberian culture. The overtly sexual images of what Wolfson describes as “divine autoerotecism” in the Kabbalah have their his- toric origin in thirteenth-century Castile. Although it will take another two hundred years for the negative, feminizing images of the Jew to be racialized and applied to the Jewish blood of the converso, Castilian culture at this time was already thoroughly infused with macho anti-Judaism, as the thirteenth- century text I quoted about circumcision and homosexuality attests. The nar- cissistic content of the Kabbalah ought to be seen within this broader Castil- ian cultural matrix as a messianically infused counterformation not unlike the one we have seen in Cardoso.