The Evolution of Converso Literature: The Writings of the Converted Jews of Medieval Spain (review)

Abstract

Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. 161 pp. $55.00. The title of this book is very promising, especially the overt implication Spain's New Christians (conversos) produced literature was, perhaps, not exactly like of their Old Christian compatriots. After all, the two groups sharing the geographic territory of Spain lived in two different realities, as Stephen Gilman pointed out in The Spain of Fernando de Rojas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). Here, our author takes new semiotic approach to analyzing medieval Spanish literature, concentrating on the semions (lexical entities suggest an associative total, or semion [p. 36]) which refer to alienation of conversos in series of works, beginning with those of Juan Poeta and ending with Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina. The fact works written by New Christians would, in one way or another, show peculiarities might well indicate the author's background is one of those matters is accepted and repeated, but without much analysis to see if, indeed, it is so, to what extent, and how similar these converso aspects are among group of authors. There have been attempts to show Jewish content or slant in individual works (see chapter 4 of Yirmiahu Yovel's Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 2 vols.], entitled Marranos in Mask and World without Transcendence: Rojas and La where he concludes the language in this work functions as carnival of masks [v. 1, p. 112]). The notable and welcome difference here is the attempt to approach the question from relatively objective point of view, maintaining consistent criteria. Indeed, if this approach is valid, it should allow the identification of works written by New Christians and may even allow us to resolve the debate among Sephardic Jews who would like to claim Cervantes as one of their own. Kaplan is making case for a unique type of allegory I call converso lament, manifestation of the con verso code reflects the intensification of anti-converso discrimination toward the end of the fifteenth century (pp. 95-96). Having studied poems by Juan Poeta and several poems which deify Queen Isabel at the beginning of her reign, Kaplan examines San Pedro's Carcel de Amor, Cota's Dialogo entre el Amor y un Viejo and Rojas's La Celestina, showing the reader there is, indeed, distinctly converso material in each of them, expressed with differing degrees of obliqueness according to the New Christians' situation within the Spanish society of their time. In conclusion, Kaplan affirms that the converso meaning of the texts under consideration is best defined from the sociohistorical perspectives of those who were considered as Others (p. …