The Marrano Approach

The Marrano phenomenon is still a relatively unexplored fact of modern Western culture. It signifies the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution but nevertheless exerts significant influence on modern humanities: philosophy, literature, and art. The methodology through which I study this influence is only loosely based on the historical research of the actual Marranos (or conversos), i.e. mostly Spanish and Portuguese Jews of the 15th and 16th century, who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism ‘undercover.’ It rather operates with the ‘Marrano metaphor’ as a means to explore the fruitful area of mixture and cross-over that allowed modern thinkers, writers, and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication – without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness, subsequently developed by them as a ‘hidden tradition.’ My research develops that of my Polish team, which extrapolated the Marrano methodology in an area that had not previously been explored from this angle, i.e., modern Polish and East-European literature. In our analysis, a ‘Marrano’ is a complex subjective figure which plays out its Jewish identity only in the act of transgressing and contaminating the fixed dogmatic categories. Modern East-European thought and literature abound with such figures of intense yet non-normative crypto-theology which can be best described in the Marrano vocabulary of creative hybridization. The ‘traces of Judaism’ can thus be found in the works of most original and outstanding Polish writers of Jewish origin, such as: Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Stanisław Lem, Bolesław Leśmian, Julian Tuwim, Leo Lipski, Teodor Parnicki, Bruno Schulz, Aleksander Wat, Józef Wittlin and Debora Vogel, as well as the writers fascinated with the Jewish tradition, as Leopold Buczkowski and Jerzy Ficowski.