TÚNEL LO PRADO

as some modern critics have observed—it concerns judging language and appearances.

That the play should reflect favorably upon the experience of a prophet, a subject otherwise altogether missing from Buchanan's polit- ical writings, is itself significant. But the truly striking feature is the way it treats the nation of the Jews. The Jewish priesthood is by no means composed of cardboard villains—and still less of proto-Christians. The young rabbi Gamaliel insists against the older, repressive rabbi Malchus that the Baptist must be given a chance to prove his insight, which, if wrong, needs be confronted at least initially with reason rather than authority and repression. Pride, violence, and arrogance, he comments in a voice not unlike Buchanan's 1539 poem in support of Thomas Cromwell, "was not this regimen which raised high our fore-fathers." The Jewish community, represented by the chorus, seems still more favorable to the Baptist. Yet even Malchus is not altogether unambivalent. He defends clerical authority by the abso- lutist (for Buchanan, tyrannical) argument: "the man in authority . . . must be his own law; if he sins, God is there to witness and pun- ish him for his crime." He is obsessed with tradition, seeks "con- cordia" within society, is utterly distrustful of the "plebs", and is fully prepared to calumniate the prophet to King Herod by insisting that religious reform will mean political revolution. But Malchus does know that things are deeply wrong in Israel and that some of the things the prophet says have merit. The flashpoint of course is the author- ity of the clergy and their immunity from judgement: "I burst with anger. Am I to listen to this in silence?" Now all of this is in con- text quite remarkable. The profoundly anti-Judaic attitudes virtually everywhere in late medieval and early modern Europe made it almost inevitable that reformers would compare the persecuting Catholic hierarchy to the pharisaical priesthood and that they would see them- selves as the successors to the early Christians. As the Jews perse- cuted the original Christians, so too did the medieval church now persecute the reformers of the sixteenth century—latter-day Jews per- secuting latter-day Christians. This trope would reach Scotland in a powerful way at least by the 1550s. But not a trace of this sort of thing is to be found in Buchanan. The Jews are simply ourselves.

Baptistes enters upon wide-ranging matters of central importance

to the sixteenth century: tyranny, reform, prophecy. Yet at its heart lies something else, the question of authenticity. Nearly every scene features some comment on people misrepresenting themselves through

language or other forms of disguise. Malchus claims that John "has beguiled the simple folk with the appearance of stern sanctity." "I have seen men parading an austere sanctity in dress, so that they readily fostered the belief that they were moderate and simple in mind." Gamaliel laments that "However much we may flatter our- selves, be proclaimed as blessed, or be considered god-like, holy, chaste, and dutiful by the common folk, none of us is free from the greatest vices." "We have long ago transformed the sense of virtue because we shine with no virtue; but in our arrogance we deceive the ignorant crowd with shining claims to it." The chorus agrees: "An assumed modesty cloaks the shameless; the cover of piety con- ceals the impious." "Feigned devotion cloaks the cruelty of tyrants, the fringed robe wicked manners. Naked virtue hides herself in thin rages in the shade of a rustic hut." John's new baptism itself raises questions about the real and the apparent in the most direct and even painful ways. How can we be sure of anything? Buchanan clearly indicates that real understanding can only occur in a more open society where claims and counter-claims might be freely and seriously considered without recourse to blinkered authority. Precisely such mindless authoritarianism in the church, Buchanan later claimed to the Inquisition, had led him to take heretical opinions seriously. Buchanan's play therefore might easily be seen as calling for a fair hearing for the latter-day prophets, the reformers—before the dan- gers of clerically-induced government repression. But Buchanan, from early on was deeply hostile to all forms of prophecy (whether apoc- alyptic, Galfridian, or astrological), surely has more in mind than simply the emerging movement for reform. Seen from the crypto- Jewish context in which it was written, as inevitably it must be, the

play speaks before anything else to the disguised community of the

conversos. Fair play for reformers really meant openness and security

for the people at the Guyenne school. Buchanan's concern with ambiguous and hidden meaning articulated a central concern of the community he had firmly embraced.

The initial trigger for the Lisbon prosecutions appeares to have been a disgruntled Guyenne alumnus, one Joao Pinheiro. In addi- tion to the talking of Buchanan's Judaizing in Scotland, Pinheiro spoke of a meal at Advent in Bordeaux in which meat was eaten, at which the monastic orders and the Church generally were criti- cized, and at which the human origins of fasting, Advent, and Lent were discussed. Is it possible that Pinheiro happened upon a seder

or at least a celebration of half remembered family traditions? If so, Buchanan may well be one of the first post-medieval Scottish intel- lectuals to participate in such an event.7

C. After the Debacle: The Critique of Empire and Commerce Buchanan and his colleagues were lucky to survive the Inquisition. The Arts College and their community did not survive. Although the University continued to possess a nominal independence until the departure of its rector, Diogo de Murça, in 1554, power had shifted decisively, and education at the university (and in Portugal generally) fell into the hands of the Jesuits where it would remain for the next three hundred years. Buchanan's anger at this experi- ence is difficult to overstate, and we can easily understand how, reputedly, he declined an offer from Dom Joäo to stay on—in what was an increasingly authoritarian and clerical environment. Instead, he immediately departed for France, and for the rest of his life strug- gled against the global Iberian empires, against the Hapsburgs, and against the universal order they sought to create. In France he devoted his talents to promoting the Valois dynasty against its rival, imagining the French realm as leading a great counter-empire that protected the liberties of Europe. Sometime after 1560 he returned to his native Scodand which he sought to visualize as an autonomous aristocratic semi-republic that realized the classical civic ideal and thereby achieved the full possibilities of human potential.

Buchanan's appointment at Coimbra had involved more than sim- ply teaching Greek to the sons of the Portuguese elite. A royal pro- fessor, he was expected to celebrate the realm, its monarch, its truly vast empire. And so he did in stately Latin verse that continued to thrill the Lisbon court long after his entire corpus was officially banned in 1581. But even while in Portugal Buchanan indicated that royal power could never be absolute. The crown for Buchanan pro- tected patriotic culture against clerical subversion, thereby allowing space for public life, for the intellect, for morality. His converso

7 P. Sharratt and P.G. Walsh (eds.), George Buchanan Tragedies (Edinburgh, 1983),

pp. 135, 151-2, 136, 139, 140, 141. Discussed by Williamson, "British Israel," pp. 101-5.

compatriots typically found it difficult ever to imagine their com- munity independent of monarchical protection, even in the most ghastly moments of persecution and pogrom. Buchanan's departure from Portugal encompassed as well a deepening departure from the sensibility of his shattered community.

The new global empires, Buchanan now insisted, subverted human capacity because they precluded the citizen and politics where value and self were realized through public discourse and were self-imposed. Clericalism and commerce underwrote this new imperialism. In words that anticipated by more than two decades the famous essay "Of Cannibals" written by his sometime student Michel de Montaigne, Buchanan claimed that Portuguese Brazil corrupted the local inhab- itants and that the setders—clergy-led "degredados" (transported pris- oners)—behaved more barbarically than even the most primitive aborigine. Cannibalism itself, the ultimate mark of barbarism for early modern Europeans, paled before the grotesque practices of the "sodomite" Europeans whose behavior, Buchanan intimated, had led to nothing less than the syphilis pandemic.8

Commerce proved nearly as troubling. Its inherent instability pre- vented its practitioners from having the autonomy required by the Ciceronian ideal. If the Iberian empires looked powerful, they were in fact sleazy and highly vulnerable mercantile enterprises that had nothing noble or grand about them. In Latin verses that must dri- ven the courts at Lisbon and Madrid apoplectic, Buchanan declared that when storm or war shuts down the pepper stall, then "the great king of many names" will need to "take out a loan or starve." Buchanan's poems doubdess contributed materially to Joao Ill's sub- sequent and most unwelcome sobriquet, "the grocer king."

It is in this context that Buchanan betrayed his only recorded instance of anti-Judaism. Although Inquisition procedures prevented Buchanan from knowing who his accusers were, he believed with some reason that a junior colleague, one Belchior Beleago (or Beliagoa), had been the the clerics' agent (the "quadruplator"—an informer who in antiquity would receive a quarter of the penalty). Beleago had therefore in the fullest sense "sold out" the university, and once out of jail and out of Portugal Buchanan launched into a series of

8 See A.H. Williamson, "Unnatural Empire: George Buchanan, Anti-Imperialism,

and the Sixteenth-Century Syphilis Pandemic," in J.E. Force and D.S. Katz (eds.), Everything Connects: In Conversation with Rufora H. Popkin (Leiden, 1998), forthcoming.

furious poems against his former colleague. Today the Beleago cycle will strike its readers as thoroughly nasty, exuberantly vulgar, scur- rilously witty; they are normally sanitized in English translation. Unfortunately, several of them are also poisonously anti-Judaic. Buchanan's claims are straight-forward: Beleago is not a professor interesting in learning or capable of it, but a cut-rate huckster who will sell anything (and especially his senior professor, Buchanan him- self). If Beleago had his way—and if Laverna, the goddess protect- ing thieves and imposters, would allow it—he would control the water supply and the sewers as well. Pay privies, perhaps? The Inquisition may have charged Buchanan with Judaizing, but Buchanan inverts the charge, for it is really Beleago who is Jewish. Beleago betrays himself as being such by his "raging passion for money" {lucn

tamfuriosus amor). In fact, as a Portuguese, Beleago was actually far more vulnerable to the characteristic Iberian accusation of having "impure" or "unclean" Jewish blood. Buchanan intimates that Beleago tried to secure certification of his blood from the Inquisition, some- thing commonly done at the time.

Jewish, Beleago, that's what you say you're not, And you wish to prove that by great testimonies ("testis," a pun on "testes"); You're wrong, the matter is not proved (as I think you know) by testimonies ("testes") but by the prick.

Yet the point of the remaining seven poems in the cycle, only two of which reference the anti-Jewish aspersion, is the demeaning ethos of commerce.9

Buchanan's commercial anti-Judaism differs profoundly from Mair's theological anti-Judaism. But, even so, its significance can be over- drawn. Within the stultifying, truly McCarthyite world of sixteenth- century Iberia—obsessed as its was with blood and race, hysterically concerned to deny (or hide) the stain of Jewish ancestry—Buchanan's anti-Jewish postures are rather commonplace than notably blood- thirsty. They were probably most striking to contemporaries for being

9 In Beleagonem

Judaeum, Beleago, quod negas te, Et vis testibus id probare magnis: Erras, testibus ista non probatur Res, (ut scis, puto) mentula probatur.

See McGinnis and Williamson, George Buchanan The Political Poetry, "Introduction: Poetry and Politics," 2/1 and the Beleago Cycle 1-8/1 (forthcoming).

nearly entirely secular. Moreover, the anti-Judaism in the poems, though certainly real, appears to serve the larger anti-mercantile pur- pose. At the heart of the matter for Buchanan is large-scale trade and the commercial enterprise itself rather than any Jewish rapac- ity. There is no plea for the good trader being squeezed out by sharp practices. For all the hostility expressed in these poems to the "solus arbiter" and to "monoplium," we do not find the slightest hint of economic liberalism or any vindication of the virtues of free trade. Trade itself appears unworthy, demeaning, contemptible. It is relevant to Buchanan's political order only because it threatens to subvert that order. For Buchanan the civic and the commercial sim- ply did not mix. The new, grotesquely distended world empires derived from the latter and for that reason were incompatible to the former. The expansion of Europe was a massive tragedy: it cor- rupted the New World while subverting the Old.

D. Conclusion: From Crypto-Judaism to Philo-Semitism

Buchanan had no difficulty becoming a part of an unmistakably crypto-Jewish community on what had promised to be a permanent basis. Arguably, it comprised one the happier moments in his long life. Its complex textures undoubtedly shaped his writing, from his

Baptistes to his attitudes towards toward the indigenous population of Brazil. If after 1552 Buchanan proved capable of making anti-Jewish comments, his mentality, informed by humanism and ultimately Calvinism, remained drastically removed from that of his professor, John Mair, and it pointed to better things.

Nevertheless, Buchanan's call for openness and his easy interac- tion with crypto-Judaism is still very far removed from modern tol- eration. It would be the next generation of Calvinist English-speakers, like Thomas Brightman and John Napier of Merchiston, who, begin- ning in the 1590s, looked the Jews as Jews to play a vital role in realizing human destiny. These people and their radical successors eventually opened the way for the 1655 Jewish readmission. All of them thought in deeply apocalyptic terms—categories quite uncon- genial to George Buchanan. They mark the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque, from Cicero to Tacitus, from crypto- Judaism to philo-Semitism.

THE ANSWER OF JOHN DURY Richard H. Popkin

When Martin Mulsow and I started planning this volume on Christian converts to Judaism in early modern times, I thought that a docu- ment I had copied from the Hartlib papers would fit with the theme. On careful reexamination of the document, which is reproduced below, it is obvious that it only deals with the problem of whether practicing Jews can be true and believing Christians at the same time and does not touch on whether practicing Christians can be true and believing Jews at the same time. The role that John Dury played in the seventeenth-century attempt to bring all the churches together might well have extended to bringing Jews into Christianity and Christians into Judaism.

Dury was early convinced of the imminent Second Coming of Jesus in the 1650s, and entered into the millenarian fervor of the Puritan Revolution in 1641 and 42. He was a Scot who had been raised and trained in Leiden and had been a pastor in Germany. He came to London in 1641 and there worked with Samuel Hartlib and Jan Amos Comenius to put forth a blueprint for the Reformation of the English-speaking world.1 The three of them proposed large-

scale reforms in agriculture, economy, and especially in education. They were going to transform education in England from pre-school to graduate school, so it would lead to spiritual and complete knowl- edge. A crown jewel of the original proposals was a project put forth by Dury, published by Hartlib, for a college of Jewish Studies (called Oriental Studies in the original). This was proposed in a pamphlet entitled Englands Thankfulnesse, or An Humble Remembrance presented to the

Committee for Religion in the High Court of Parliament with Thanhgiving for

1 See Charles Webster, The Great Instauration, (London, 1975), 48-51; Charles

Webster (ed.), Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement ofUarning (Cambridge, 1970), 26-46; Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Three Foreigners: The Philosophy of the Puritan Revolution," in Religion, The Reformation and Social Change (London, 1967), 262-274.

that happy Pacification betweene the two Kingdomes. By a faithful well-wisher to this Church and Nation. Wherein are sumanly discovered a naïve and most subtile Plot of the Pope and his conclave against Protestancy. Their true method and policy how to undermine the same. The best and pnncipal meanes of re- establishing the Palatin House and preserving all Evangelical Churches. As like- wise three special Instruments of the publique good in the ways of Religion L·arning and the Preparatives for the conversion of the Jewes.2 The purpose of the college would be to make Christians more knowledgeable about Judaism and make the Jews find Christianity less offensive.3

The college was to be based in London, to have had three profes- sors, Menasseh ben Israel, a rabbi from Amsterdam; Adam Boreel, the leader of the Dutch Collegiants; and a Professor Johann Stephan Rittangel, who taught Hebrew in Amsterdam and edited the impor- tant kabbalistic text, Sqfir Yesira.* The Hartlib papers indicate that Menasseh was ready to accept the post even though he did not live in England and had not yet arrived there. Dury had to convince Hartlib of Boreel's bona fides and described him as an important Hebraist and philo-semite. Rittangel turned out to be a bone of con- tention. Nobody could tell what religion he had started with and what he believed in the present. He was fighting with everybody. It was rumored that he had been a Jew, who had become a Catholic, who had become a Lutheran, who had become all sorts of things. He dressed like an Eastern European rabbi and had spent twenty years in Turkey with Jews and Caraites. Pierre Bayle tells us that, in the attempt to discover whether Rittangel had been born a Jew, questioners approached Mrs. Rittangel and asked her whether her husband had been circumcised. She refused to answer, so the mys- tery remains.5

The flaw in the project was not the personnel but rather the financing. Dury had modestly proposed that Parliament expend a

2 For more detail about it, see, Richard H. Popkin, "The First College for Jewish

Studies", Revue des études juives, Vol. 143, July-December 1984.

3 See Popkin, "The First College for Jewish Studies," in: Revue des études juives,

Vol. 143. July-December, 1984, 353.

4 Dury knew all three from his years in The Netherlands. He was especially

involved with Menasseh and Boreel. Rittangel is a curious character who proved too difficult to manage for the project.

5 See Pierre Bayle's article, "Rittangel," in his Dictionnaire histonque et aitique. Written

over fifty years after the college plan, in which he still wonders whether Rittangel was a Jew who became a Christian or a Christian who became a Jew or went