Blood and spirit: Paternity, fraternity and religious self-fashioning in Luis de Carvajal’s spiritual autobiography

Abstract

The subterranean networks of New World crypto-Judaism rarely thrived in isolation. Rather, as Jonathan I. Israel, Yosef Kaplan, and others have shown, these secret Jewish communities were connected to a global network of fellow Conversos and openly professing Jews living throughout Europe and the Americas.2 These disparate groups were connected through a complex web of familial, economic, and family ties. Commercial links were solidified by marriage; therefore, business and family were inseparable. Real-world family connections made of “blood and treasure” were intertwined with a longing for family in metaphorical and spiritual terms. Beyond the bonds of flesh and blood, individual crypto-Jews found paternity and brotherhood with like-minded religious searchers for a family of spirit inseparably connected with their family of flesh and blood. This paper explores the dialectical relationship between the socio-economic iteration of family and its more spiritual, metaphorical expression within the context of New World crypto-Judaism. (from Introduction)