Stuck in the a mid-midst of a moniker you can't get out of, to paraphrase Bono. Joan Jett, Adam Ant, lil' sis, our mom, first g-f, matzah, Antelope Valley shout-outs.
Despite my first and last common names, I initial my cumbersome middle. I honor my maternal surname. Uncle Jack, sole family bearer of it, died in the amphibious assault on Saipan, June 15th, 1944. That sad aside, let’s track its surprising maybe-origin saga.
The Coat of Arms of the Lencastre family: Portugal with a bend for illegitimacy (cf. Vladimir Nabokov’s eerie dystopia Bend Sinister, and me being a fan of The Fall, 1986’s dour entry among innumerable {it’s #9/ if out of 32…studio, or is it 33?} LP’s)
It’s fairly uncommon, unlike my paternal (and first) all too bog-standard. Which I dislike too. I lack reversion to a middle one as first, although this J. Lancaster Murphy nomenclature itself for anyone looks pretentious and/ or ominous. (G. Gordon Liddy, L. Ron Hubbard, J. Edgar Hoover.) In grad school, a classmate said my tripled name sounded like an author of potboilers. As English lit fanboys, backhanded compliment?
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The wedding of Philippa of Lancaster and João I of Portugal
Whenever as schoolboys do, one asked one’s middle name, the braying, hayseed, hick-ville comeback’d be in Southern California a drawn-out, exaggerated “l-aaahaan-caah-st’r” as that’s an Antelope Valley (not as picturesque as it sounds) exurb populated by tumbleweeds, meth, gangs, sub-primes, foreclosures, sandstorm sub-suburbia with crazy commutes to the smoggy L.A. basin (another name I curdle at) on a forlorn, long, freeway funneling down. (#1 industry into that desiccated declivity included in a census, meaning goodies, uh, entitlements, via us/ U.S. taxpayers. A municipal alliance between small burbs + big prisons= the families of those incarcerated may move in as neighbors. Which may complicate concerns of community stability, safety, security.)
Isabel de Lencastre, Queen of Portugal
Whereas my mom’d proudly, albeit in futility against hick hecklers, pronounce it “LANG’stir” with a schwa gulped into a glottal stop. I guess she had the opposite predicament. A vanishingly rare first name, a mispronounced (in many a heartland and Western slice of America) maiden name, and only patron her confirmation saint the Little Flower, St Thèrése, not Teresa of Avila, of Jewish ancestors, of Lisieux. (I gave a great 2019 paper, in Portland the “City of Roses” if I do say so myself, about the olfactory and relic devotions generated in Ireland when her coffin, and the rags from Padre Pio’s stigmata, made their 21st c. rounds; it garnered only one question—any ties to the Ballinspittle “moving statues” craze from the previous generation?—being scheduled as all my three-dozen conference papers it felt like, if not really, @ 8 A.M.)
A poor quality image of Jorge de Lencastre, Duke of Coimbra
Since I’m researching the derivations of many ways my ancestors were mocked, met, hailed, praised, derided, sentenced, summoned, and inevitably cursed, intriguing that a likely origin of Lancaster finds a brief jot in processes of the Inquisition. Admittedly in Mexico rather than Spain; perhaps additionally in its South American viceroyalty of Nueva España, north of where I type this in the high hinterland later turned Nueva Granada and then Gran Colombia before breaking off into Ecuador ~200 years ago.
A recently discovered miniature, is it fetching Maria de Gudalupe de Lencastre?
José de López, brother of López de Leon de Mendoza y Alencastro ---- found himself called to the Inquisition in Durango, 1701, “processed” on charges of “judaizante.” Let’s pause. A “Judaizer” is one who, once he or she’s chosen to exit the Chosen People, subsequently resumes their rejected belief-system/ faith-observance. As in Islam, this carries fatal penalties, for diehards, under Catholic and Crown-Iberian Inquisitions, if, stay with me, said miscreant holds out against repenting to “Rome.”
Maria de Guadalupe, 6th Duchess of Aveiro, Duchess of Maqueda (same as above?)
Most blame the Pope, Religion, God, Christians et al. Critics, Pythons aside for their Oxbridge bonafides, who sputter self-righteously against the Whore of Babylon fail to distinguish nuances. Which may be casuistic, but nonetheless the medievalist (and early modern-ist) in me wants clarification of this thorny, hoary, anti-clerical and persistent calumny. As it happens, perhaps a few thousand over centuries died for their supposed lapse. An awful crime, but akin to the “Burning Times” peddled of “ten million” witches, kindling potboilers, far from serious scholarship sustained.
(Yet in Hamas’ 10/7 terror raid see, nearly instantaneously, even when in this terrible case the perpetrators Go-Pro’d their own savagery, how educated millions rushed to not “believe women” but to fulminate that “rape kits” weren’t provided and victims—being largely Jewish, in the traditional 24 hours—allegedly too hastily were interred. Supposedly educated progressives who persistently oppose FGM while applauding brutal Islamists. I’d mentioned I’d be raising this, so I’ll keep terse. Sheryl Sandberg ex-Facebook CEO discusses it w/ Honestly’s Bari Weiss at The Free Press. All the same, I stress this incident of propaganda deployed—Leah Sarna at aJewish Review of Books January ‘24 roundtable’s worth hearing out on feminists—to destroy in the cause of “anti-Zionist/ Israel” to demonstrate how despite real-time, time-stamped pictures worth thousands of words of whichever tone, calumny slyly spreads. And how numb our “faith” can render undeniable, factual, objective, eye-witnessed, uploaded truth. Sobering lessons in how rapidly categories strangle empathy, in dubious solidarity.)
Burning the Tavora family and the Duke of Aveiro
Back to earlier instigators of what remain contested power plays, both Spain and Portugal established their Crown jurisdiction, theoretically legally apart from Rome, to investigate backsliders. Those who reverted to their former, suspect faith after undergoing certification as Catholics. Technically, they prosecuted unfaithful “conversos,” or New Christians, who’d earlier converted. Under duress, out of conviction (or the wish to avoid such a fate), social ambition, financial stress, belief, who knows the myriad reasons impelling them to deny their ancestral Jewish or Moorish roots? But who then lapsed. For this, not because they before were Jewish or Muslim, were they indicted. Some today label the former as “anusim,” or “forced ones,” as in the “crypto-Jews” of New Mexico; they’re not the “marranos,” those who went incognito or underground as it were to remain in some attenuated sense Jewish. This derogatory slur’s from “pig-eaters” and today’s not in use among the fewer so better informed. I’d append that not all became Christian without volition, even if the degree of freedom granted this choice is very iffy. At our epochal distance, maybe the parallels with those dissenting from Islam in certain nations provide the best analogy.
Beating the Duke of Aveiro (before he’s immolated above)
Second, who’s Sephardic jumbles. Not really Italians or Greeks, nor the Mizrahi under Persian and later Ottoman rule depending on where. Nor the North African Moroccan or Tunisian enclaves. Yemen? Nope. Neither the Bukhara of Central Asia, nor certainly the Falasha from Ethiopia. But many (contrast the blunt Catholic here, all you heretic/ not-one-of-us lot Protestant) divide in this simple binary anyone not from the Ashkenazi “German” crowd, who actually turn out steadily themselves to drift towards Eastern Europe shtetls in turn, complicating again as they mix with their Sephardic brethren on the fringes under Turkish domination, and in Holland in particular, as well as winding up with the latter meaning early on in Brazil and the New World “Portuguese” was practically a synonym for “Jew.” And New Amsterdam?
The “Alencastro” clan is far more numerous in Portugal’s vast former South American colony than in their little homeland of southwestern Iberia. Spawned by the marriage of John of Gaunt, pre-War of the Red Rose L’s vs White Yorkists, to a Braganza princess, medieval Portuguese adopted de Lancastre. This nobly or social-climbingly “Ibernicized” into aspirants as Alencastro, which like samy-sounding Lancaster ranks among Sephardic surnames. May be more A’s than L’s in the New World. In Ecuador, it’s second only to Brazil for still relative (un-) bearers, in Quito’s Pinchicha province due south. On either end of salty spans, a toponym. Castro= castle= Latin castrum= caiseal Irish. “Lan”=”slán”= health, so a salubrious {river-?} fortress, although many trace the L-word= Lugh as trickster-ish metal crafter/ warrior/ savior Celtic deity.
Fernando de Alencastre Noroña, Duke of Linares, Viceroy of New Spain
My mom told me her line had settled in Poplar, East End of London, where they worked in a “biscuit factory.” But that they originated in the Netherlands. They weren’t Catholic and it seems perhaps not Christian of any slant; her mom Evelyn converted on “Spy Wednesday,” was baptized on Holy Thursday, and died on Good Friday. I know among mom’s mother and aunts early orphaned that some girls were brought up Christian Scientist. And that, see my Moscow Jewish-born stepfather’s father (Abrahamson, Americanized into Adams around the turn into last century) as case two, that this affiliation wasn’t out of the ordinary for a few maybe 150 years ago, a devolution from assimilated Jewish to intermarrying or adopting into a Mary Baker Eddy-friendly denomination. I can’t vouch for this except “personal testimony” as they say in genealogy, but I came across this historical blip, discussing this with mom.
José de Carvajal y Lancáster, Secretary of State
If I may conjecture. The Lancaster in turn emerges from Evelyn Neville, two steps more back to Charlotte Bray. In Plashet cemetery in London, among the countless Jewish graves, a Lancaster pops up. In other such plots, Neville (knees up, Annie) totters in time frames aligning with my line’s needed chronology, in between Evelyn and Charlotte, neither of whom I can pin down in a resting place. The area my family labored in was 95% Jewish around Portobello Road markets at the turn into the last century. Whenever I’d bring up Poplar to those in the English know, Jewish or not, I’d get back an instant question: “were they Jewish?” Émigré Irish (as in my clan) did populate Yiddish’d streets, but nowhere the numbers of the MoT’. Great-Aunt Olive told me that Neville’d been a name change. Not much to go on, but in gaps, perhaps?
Luis de Lencastre, Grand Commander of the Order of Avis (“they tried harder…” dating myself here as born in the Sixties. But not really a boomer; Gen Jones.)
She was very sallow, dark-complected, like “black Irish.” Suitably “Olive.” Their sultry lineage looked Mediterranean, even Levantine. My mom happened to be, like me, very fair skinned; pale blue eyes rather than the hazel or brown trend; ash-blonde rather than black-haired norm. Note non-Christian, no-saint first names. Mom bore outlier “Merla,” blackbird in Italian (Kafka btw its Czech match; I told a student who had this surname and he’d no idea; likewise another surnamed the Italian Merlo), and middle, to me a hint, Ruth. My sister has the same first name; she like me has always been socially embarrassed by an awkward choice. She opts as I can’t for her middle, a stereotypical Irish. If addressed by telltale, mum M., this alerts her to telemarketers.
Isabel de Lencastre
Features, although I doubt I ever said this aloud out of rare tact, embedded my wild surmise that they might be Sephardic, as I knew even amidst my goyisch ignorance of the Iberia-to-Dutch diaspora. The leap from there to England, too, as was the first wave over the Atlantic, a Sephardic shift. My wife was related to both Emma Lazarus and to Benjamin Cardozo, and her maternal side, “Sunshine” neé Sonnenschein Berliners on her (rarely employed antonym “spear-side” as the feminine’s “distaff”—cf. Joan Jett-Adam Ant analogy!), was on the other the coinage Kröner from Sweden. Story goes an escaping nun fell in love with a wandering Jew during the expulsion in/ post-1492, and they sailed another ocean blue or its seas to wind up Scandinavian. Surely within such tall tales nestles a kernel of truth passed on, when quirky details stay afloat. (A reason that the Gospels, C.S. Lewis et al. assert as possessing “reality,” and why Torah’s truthiness (Stephen Colbert’s term), the last Lubavitcher Rebbe’s deft Chabad interpreter defends: why else memorialize your “stiff-necked” people’s flaws?)
Although I know by (my late wife’s) hearsay of a mutual MoT L.A. acquaintance who obtained Spanish citizenship as a Sefardi descendant, the amateur genealogist in me quails at how this must have been proven. Not to mention yours truly, temp, paying petitioner for Ecuadorian permanent residency, deed plus cédula holder, casado left now unwilling viudo—that’s the whole process redux, double the cost, señor Jhon [sic as it’s universally spelled such in Latin America, as in the vulgate vernacular’s Jhonny “tocayo”}, will bestower (sorry unless you’re my two sons, no dice for my property but you can visit me upon vetting—you’ll never find it on your own; I have the gate key)…Love the map, used in teaching Comparative Religions three-dozen times, thirteen years, week seven.
Which is why in later years, when the Ashkenazi rabbinate wavered towards laxity, we got to eat legumes during Pesach. Because, I countered, my wife’s own “mispochah” sustains Sephardic “blood.” Sunnier, always more lenient about rice, nuts, and such; grim frum “Germans” forbade these as getting confused with grain, “chametz”; all I know is I miss choco-covered matzah my wife would bake, which I devoured in great sheets. Bread of affliction, if of a digestive twist. Maybe in honor of my recuperated moniker, I will try to align three meters high in the Andes with baking my own, solo.
A packed suitcase proverbially/ practically stands by a Jewish door. As this is but the Middle of ancient + modern ages of, 2500 (4000?) years of dusty, desperate diasporas.
P.P.S. About the first lassie I ever kissed; her father was none other than a Knight of Malta, and he first told me, summer ‘79, about the Portuguese-Lancaster connexion.
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