ABSTRACT
The metaphorical and physical blood of circumcision was a focal point of group and ethnic identity for the Portuguese Jews following their expulsion from Spain in 1492, and their mass conversion in Portugal in 1497. Portuguese Jews, by synthesizing both Iberian and Jewish conceptualizations of blood and blood lineage, and circumcision (particularly the blood shed during the ritual), constructed a uniquely Iberian Jewish communal identity during the early modern period in Europe and its colonies. At the same time, non-Jews also utilized the ritual of circumcision, and ideas of Jewish blood to construct Jewish identity and community. The seventeenth-century French artist, Bernard Picart, was one of several non-Jewish artists during the period to depict the Jewish circumcision ritual. His etchings illustrate the complexity of Jewish identity and civility, the ‘difference’ of Jewish ritual, and the central role that circumcision and circumcision blood played in the identity of Jews in early modern Europe. Throughout the early modern period, Portuguese Jews and New Christians (known collectively as La Nação) recreated their Iberian Jewish identity and religious community. This process drew from the community’s experience with the peninsula’s construction of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), the experience of the Inquisition, a reintroduction to halakhic Judaism, and the interpretation of La Nação’s history through biblical stories and divine events. Four of the ways that blood formed La Nação’s identity both by group members and outsiders are: (1) the manner in which limpieza de sangre was reinterpreted by La Nação in the Iberian diaspora so that Jewish blood was no longer understood as impure but rather as a symbol of purity and devotion to God’s covenant with the people Israel; (2) the belief that Jews and conversos of the community were bound by blood both in the context of traditional Jewish sources and the memory
of the Inquisition; (3) through the central role of the blood-letting ritual of circumcision which reinforced and enacted La Nação’s physical and metaphorical ideas of blood; and (4) by acting as an imagined biological connection at the heart of the common European conflation of contemporary Jews and biblical Israelites, and Jews and indigenous Americans. Following a discussion of the centrality of circumcision to the re-Judaizing Portuguese Jewish community, these themes will be considered in terms of Bernard Picart’s image La circoncision des juifs portugais, a seventeenth-century etching, which appeared in his multi-volume encyclopedia, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde [The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World]. In the final section of this chapter, La circoncision des juifs portugais will be considered in tandem with Picart’s Ceremonies que les Mexicains pratiquent à l’egard de leurs enfans (Ceremonies used by the Mexicans with regard to their Children), an etching of Mexican ritual in the New World, which may serve to reinforce the early modern popular connection of Jews and indigenous Americans. The centrality of blood and circumcision, and the conflation of Jews and Israelites, are reflected in La circoncision des juifs portugais – an etching illustrating the moment following the circumcision of a Portuguese Jewish infant as he sits on his godfather’s lap and bleeds.3 This illustration prominently features the infant, his godfather, and three Christian women, and captures the centrality and mystery of circumcision in the Jewish and Christian imaginations in a precise time and place. Picart’s etching suggests the importance of circumcision as witnessed by Jews and others, the fluidity of identity, and the transformations of religion and religious community in the early modern period.
