Did Michel de Montaigne have Jewish Ancestry?

The great French Catholic philosopher Michel de Montaigne – who is often ranked as one of the greatest philosophers of the Renaissance – has a bit of a secret in that like the great Spanish and Portuguese figures of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation – such as Saint Teresa of Avila, (1) Saint John of the Cross, (2) Saint John of Avila, (3) Saint John of God (4) and Miguel de Cervantes – (5) he has claimed to have been of Marrano/jewish origin.

This claim is based on the fact that Montaigne’s mother Antionette de Louppes de Villeneuve was – in whole or in part – of possible Spanish descent and claims by jewish historians such Cecil Roth promoting the idea that she was a Marrano/a jewess as a proven fact. (6)

Indeed, the jewish writer Marvin Lowenthal claimed in 1935 that she ‘was, by blood, a Jewess’ (7) and deliberately tried to imply that Montaigne genius as a philosopher came from his supposed jewish mother (8) much as Roth was to do five years later in his 1940 book ‘The Jewish Contribution to Civilization’. (9)

The most common origin for this claim however is Donald Frame’s 1965 ‘Montaigne: A Biography’ where he writes that:

‘The family of Antionette de Louppes de Villeneuve, though about as eminent and prosperous as the Eyquems, were marranos or converted Spanish Jews. Now the stock in which Montaigne takes pride is the Egyuems; he never discusses his maternal ancestry; he might as well have been born of the Eyquems alone. He may have regretted, even deplored, the Lopez side of his heritage.’ (10)

Now what you might easily miss is that Frame states this is a ‘possibility’ just before he states the above. (11) So, what Frame is actually stating is not that – as it would first appear – this is a certainly but rather it is a theory – albeit he believed it to be true – that has been advanced, but the evidence is not conclusive.

These type of theories were extremely common from the 1930s to the 1960s for Renaissance and Counter-Reformation figures with Spanish and Portuguese lineages and we can date most of them – such as the (false) claims about ‘the jewish ancestry’ of Saint Teresa of Avila and Cervantes – to his time and are still often uncritically retailed as ‘proven fact’ to this day despite being widely rejected in the literature and/or with rather large holes in them that make holding to such claims completely untenable.

However, Frame does an excellent job of explaining the ‘jewish origin’ theory such as it is:

‘Montaigne’s maternal ancestry, which recent scholarship has traced far back, resembles the paternal in many ways but differs in the fact, only too often all-important, that the Lopez de Villanueva were Jews.

In the market town of Calatayud in Aragon, about fifty miles southwest of Saragossa on the road to Madrid, there lived during the fourteenth century a Jewish family named Pacagon (or Pazagon, Patagon) whose head, Moses, a wealthy rag dealer, under the threat of persecution, became converted to Christianity, taking the name Garcia Lopez or Garcilopez, probably from an aristocratic sponsor who had consented to be his godfather. Since his home was in the less ancient part of Calatayud called Villanueva, he came to be known as Garcilopez de Villanueva. His conversion occurred between 1411 and 1414; later he moved to Saragossa and was followed thither by his sons and most of his relatives from Calatayud, including his close kinsman – probably a first cousin – Mayer Pacagon, the great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of Montaigne, who upon conversion took the name Juan Lopez de Villanueva.’ (12)

This sounds pretty solid and appears to get stronger when we realise that Montaigne’s alleged great-great-great grandfather Micer Pablo de Villenueva was burned by the Inquisition in 1491. (13)

But even Frame recognizes there are problems with this theory in that if Micer Pablo de Villenueva was such a devout jew that he was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1491 then why was his son – Montaigne’s alleged great-great grandfather - such a devout Christian (14) and his alleged grandfather Pierre de Louppes a Third Order Franciscan by the time of his death. (15)

You might aver that this is no barrier to Montaigne having a Marrano origin, but it is more of a problem than would first appear, because the Marrano/Sephardi families were generally extremely aware they were Marranos and often took a form of perverse pride in it as well as married among other such families which the ‘de Louppes’ in this theory didn’t do but instead inexplicably married ‘Old Christian’ families instead (which would have been a major of socio-cultural faux pas on both sides of the fence).

So, us having no references to this from Montaigne is decidedly odd, but is this is interpreted by promoters of the theory that Montaigne had jewish ancestry as evidence in and of itself of such jewish ancestry – in essence there is no way that it could not be true in their presentation – because he was ‘covering it up’. (16) To further buttress this they claim that because Montaigne was curious about jewish religious rites (17) and was more ‘neutral on the jews’ than most of his contemporaries. (18)

Therefore Montaigne was jewish in their minds.

The problem is that this account of Montaigne’s ‘jewish’ origins is a reconstruction based on assumed not known linkages despite jewish attempts to claim otherwise (19) as Montaigne’s most recent academic biographer Philippe Desan has explained.

Since despite all the hype – and Desan seemingly trying to favour the theory – (20) he is forced by intellectual honesty to explain that:

‘While possible, the Jewish origins of Antionette de Louppes have never been proven with certainty and do not authorize us to confuse family origin with Montaigne’s cultural and religious identity. In fact, the settlement of the Louppes family in Toulouse dates from well before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Their establishment in the south of France be explained by the economic prospects tied to the pastel business in that region.’ (21)

Put another way: the jewish genealogy offer by Frame is nonsense and that Antionette de Louppes de Villeneuve’s family may well have in actuality merely been upwardly mobile Franco-Spanish peasants. Since he further points out that:

‘The remarkable absence of allusions to his mother could reasonably be explained by a desire to keep quiet about his common extraction. For while time had permitted to erase the bourgeois ancestry of his paternal side, this was not yet the case for his maternal side.’ (22)

Put another way Desan is telling us that Montaigne didn’t have jewish ancestry and proponents of the claim that he did are in fact offering a speculative genealogy not an evidenced genealogy and that there are alternative and far more plausible explanations for the evidence they put forward in support of that genealogy.

So, no Michel de Montaigne does not in fact have any evidenced jewish ancestry whatsoever.

References

(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-saint-teresa-of-avila-jewish

(2) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-saint-john-of-the-cross-jewish

(3) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-saint-john-of-avila-jewish

(4) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-saint-john-of-god-jewish

(5) See my articles: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-miguel-de-cervantes-jewish and https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/miguel-de-cervantes-race-islam-and

(6) Cecil Roth, 1953, ‘Personalities and Events in Jewish History’, 1st Edition, Jewish Publication Society of America: Philadelphia, pp. 212-215

(7) Marvin Lowenthal, 1935, ‘The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne’, 1st Edition, George Routledge & Sons: London, p. 8

(8) Ibid., pp. 8-9

(9) Cecil Roth, 1940, ‘The Jewish Contribution to Civilization’, 1st Edition, Harper & Brothers: New York, pp. 116-117

(10) Donald Frame,1965, ‘Montaigne: A Biography’, 1st Edition, Hamish Hamilton: London, pp. 16-17

(11) Ibid., p. 16

(12) Ibid., p. 21

(13) Ibid., pp. 22-23

(14) Ibid., p. 24

(15) Ibid., p. 23

(16) Ibid., pp. 16-17; also, Lowenthal, Op. Cit., pp. 8-9

(17) Frame, Op. Cit., p. 18

(18) Ibid., p. 17

(19) https://www.jinfo.org/Authors.html

(20) Philippe Desan, 2016, ‘From Eyquem to Montaigne’, p. 46 in Philippe Desan (Ed.), 2016, ‘The Oxford Handbook of Montaigne’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York

(21) Ibid., p. 47

(22) Ibid.