Resilience and Redemption: A Transatlantic Perspective on Psalms in Espejo fiel de vidas (Faithful Mirror of Lives)

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• Resilience and Redemption:A Transatlantic Perspective on Psalms in Espejo fiel de vidas (Faithful Mirror of Lives)
• Matthew Warshawsky (bio)

This article studies Espejo fiel de vidas que contiene los Psalmos de David en verso, obra devota, útil y deleitable (Faithful Mirror of Lives That Contains the Psalms of David in Verse, a Devout, Useful, and Pleasing Work) by Daniel Israel López Laguna as a means of understanding the influence of a converso, or New Christian, worldview on his paraphrase of Psalms written when he lived openly as a Jew in Jamaica.¹ López Laguna and his poem encapsulate the transatlantic reach of the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish diaspora two centuries after the expulsion and conversion of Iberian Jews during the 1490s. Born in Portugal or France in the mid-1600s, raised in the latter country, educated in Spain, and apparently prosecuted by the Holy Office of the Inquisition of Spain or Portugal for Jewish heresy, López Laguna wrote the earliest literary work by a Jew in Jamaica, which he took to London for publication in the large Sephardic community of that city. Written in a Spanish illustrative of the poet's absorption of Baroque literary trends, Faithful Mirror of Lives reflects the author's geographical and spiritual trajectory by illuminating the importance of resilience and redemption in his reworking of Psalms. This article explores these themes by analyzing passages that show the hybrid nature of the poet as an emergent, or "New," Jew, possibly raised as a crypto-Jewish New Christian, who uses the literary language of Catholic Spain to communicate his experience of the converso mindset. Examples of this mindset include a geographical and spiritual wandering represented in the peregrino, or pilgrim; praise of the elect status of the Israelite people; entreaty of God to protect conversos against enemies representative of the Inquisition and gratitude for doing so; and disparagement of talebearers, a clear reference to the malsín, or inquisitorial informant. Through his paraphrase of Psalms, López Laguna offers readers intimate access to how these elements of the converso worldview informed his practice and understanding of [End Page 553] Judaism. In turn, such access broadens American Jewish historical narratives to include an early modern Sephardic voice that sheds light on the hopes and fears of New Christians who resisted the centuries-long efforts of the Iberian Inquisition to prevent them from recovering their Jewish identity.

This article builds upon the work of other scholars who have studied how Espejo fiel represents the Jewish identity of a diasporic former New Christian after 1492. For example, among more recent analyses of the work, Ronnie Perelis suggests that the autobiographical nature of Psalms permits López Laguna to "express his own sentiments and reflect on his own life of tumult and salvation" without focusing on himself as a first-person speaker.² Laura Leibman situates Espejo fiel within messianic and typological currents of the Sephardic diaspora during the 1600s and early 1700s, arguing that, through the image of a mirror, López Laguna "rewrites [Psalms] to reflect the dispersed conversos' experiences," producing not a "faithful translation" of the Psalms but one that "paraphrases or 'reflects'" the biblical precursor.³ In her study of Espejo fiel, Ruth Fine calls attention to the work "as a testimonial narrative of persecution and Sephardic exile" and demonstrates how it recovers Psalms for diasporic conversos previously unfamiliar with the biblical work.⁴ Fine also compares specific passages of Espejo fiel with the Vulgate, the Ferrara Bible, and the so-called Bear Bible by Casiodoro de Reina in order to argue that López Laguna may have used the original Hebrew of Psalms and to show how he "transfers the Biblical text to his contemporary context and personal life experience, especially in registering the mark of trauma."⁵ Informed by the work of these and other [End Page 554] scholars, the following analysis situates Espejo fiel within the context of its publication and then, through a previously unexplored study of López Laguna's voice in eight Psalms from his paraphrase, shows how Baroque Spanish literary customs and Iberian inquisitorial society forged his literary worldview.

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