19

ISSN: 1645-1910

Parte I: Artigos

Carsten L. Wilke (Central European University) – The New Christians of Tavira in the Sixteenth Century: Trade, Diaspora and Religious Heterodoxy between Morocco and the Low Countries

Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 19 (2018): 11-28

palavras-chave

Algarve; Crypto-Judaism; Protestantism; Messianism; Commerce

resumo

This article focuses on the New Christian community that existed in Tavira, the major Algarvian city of the mid-sixteenth century. Its trade networks connected it to the French, English, and Flemish seaports, as well as to the Moroccan Sephardim. Knowledge about non-Catholic religions reached the Taviran New Christians from both ends of their trade route; and their beliefs and practices evidence a complex culture, including crypto-Jewish rituals, clandestine Bible readings, messianic expectations aroused by the Protestant Reformation, the infiltration of Moroccan Jewish traditions, and calls for Church reform among local Old Christians. Testimony from the Lisbon Inquisition, which destroyed this community in 1563-1567, is completed by the Marrakesh Dialogues, a polemical Jewish work written in Spanish by Estêvão Dias, a Taviran exile in Antwerp. These new sources will help to place this local community in its larger European and African framework.

Javier Luis Álvarez Santos (CHAM – NOVA FCSH) – Identidad judeo-cristiana e identidades insulares en áreas de frontera: Los intereses judeoconversos en Tenerife en el tejido mercantil atlántico (1550-1650)

Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 19 (2018): 29-46

palavras-chave

Comercio; Transnacional; Transfronterizo; Área de contacto; Insulares; Océano

resumo

Durante el periodo de consolidación del Atlántico se establecieron en Canarias individuos de diversa procedencia, entre ellos una importante comunidad de origen judeoconversa, con interés en la economía atlántica. Estos agentes fueron conscientes de que tenían que intervenir en la administración política y mercantil local para dinamizar sus conexiones. Se yuxtapuso, por tanto, su lucro personal –y el de su red– al potencial rendimiento económico de un espacio insular.
Este trabajo tiene como objetivo hacer una nueva lectura, a partir de los estudios clásicos insulares y de nuevos aportes documentales, sobre el papel los judeoconversos como elementos conductores que empatan las necesidades del Archipiélago con el circuito mercantil atlántico y, al mismo tiempo, representan la voluntad de las redes extranjeras. En último término, esta comunión de intereses repercutió en la conformación social de un espacio de frontera y en la construcción de una identidad de identidades de los insulares.

François Soyer (University of New England) – ‘Secret Synagogues’: Fact and Fantasy from Portugal to Macau

Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 19 (2018): 47-66

palavras-chave

Portugal; Macau; Synagogue; Judaism; Conversos

resumo

Ideas and fantasies about Jews and Judaism have constituted an integral part of the cultural matrix through which Christians in the Western World have fashioned their understanding of the world. This article examines the claims made by the Jesuit Francisco de Meneses and inquisitor Rui Sodrinho de Mesquita concerning the existence of a large community of Judaizing conversos established in Macau and seeking to operate a secret synagogue. When analyzed against the well-established trend amongst early modern Spanish and Portuguese writers to vastly exaggerate the size of converso communities and the extent of judaizing, a necessary note of caution must arise in the way that such claims about Judaizing conversos are treated by historians.

Jaap Cohen (independent scholar) – The inescapable ancestry of Eli d’Oliveira. A Dutch Sephardic rescue operation based upon the myth of Sephardic superiority, 1941-1944

Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 19 (2018): 67-84

palavras-chave

Action Portuguesia; Sephardim; World War II; Myth of Sephardic Superiority; Amsterdam

resumo

During World War II, the Sephardic psychological counsellor Eli d’Oliveira from Amsterdam undertook great efforts to evade deportation in a legal way. He tried to prove to the Nazi occupier that he descended from Christian families in the Iberian Peninsula and hence did not belong to the Jewish ‘race’. D’Oliveira was not the only one who did so. He took part in the so-called Action Portuguesia, a rather large-scale rescue operation in which a group of Dutch Sephardim tried to evade deportation collectively by implementing parts of the pseudo-scientific racial discourse, which stood at the centre of National Socialist ideology. Their theory was based upon the myth of Sephardic superiority. In this article, the author describes and analyses the Action Portuguesia through the eyes of Eli d’Oliveira. By taking this biographical approach, both the rational and emotional arguments behind a highly controversial episode in Sephardic WW II historiography come to light.

Parte II: Crónicas

Cláudia Ninhos – Workshop “The Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam: places of memory”. Lisboa, 9 de Abril de 2018

Ignacio Chuecas Saldías – Workshop Internacional “Os papéis da Inquisição. Conservação e dispersão na Europa, América e Ásia / Papeles de la Inquisición. Conservación y dispersión en Europa, América y Asia”. Lisboa, 25 de junio de 2018

Andrea Cicerchia – Workshop “As Inquisições entre realidade e perceção. Figuras institucionais e Espiritualidade”. Lisboa, 31 de Outubro de 2018

Anabela Fernandes, Ana Isabel Ribeiro e Joana Cortez-Smyth – Projecto “Do discurso e da cultura na diáspora sefardita portuguesa”

Parte III: Recensões

Angelo Adriano Faria de Assis – Ana Hutz, Homens de nação e de negócios: redes comerciais no mundo ibérico (1580-1640), São Paulo, Intermeios, 2017

Cristóbal José Álvarez López – Ángel Berenguer Amador, El libro sefardí La güerta de oro de David M. Atías (Liorna, 1778). Edición y estudio lingüístico del verbo, Zaragoza, Pórtico / Lausanne, Sociedad Suiza de Estudios Hispánicos, 2017

Carla Vieira – David Wertheim (ed.), The Jew as a Legitimation. Jewish-Gentile Relations Beyond Antisemitism and Philosemitism, New York, Pallgrave Macmillan, 2017

Susana Bastos Mateus – Paloma Díaz-Mas e Elisa Martín Ortega (eds.), Mujeres sefardíes lectoras y escritoras, siglos XIX-XXI, Madrid, Iberoamericana, 2016