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Belmonte Museum Records History of Anusim by Sérgio Castro Pinheiro From HaLapid, Summer 2005 The Hebrews sojourned in the land of Egypt for nearly 430 years. The Bible tells us little more about that period in the life of our ancestors; as such, we know next to nothing about these four centuries in the history of the Israelites. There is another period of nearly 400 years during which the history of an entire segment of the Jewish people vanishes from view. Between the onset of the persecution of Jews in Portugal, in 1496, and the first written testimonies of Jewish travelers’ encounters with Portuguese marranos at the end of the nineteenth century, there is an enormous gap in Jewish history: nearly four centuries, during which the persecuted descendants of Portugal’s Jews all but ceased to exist, little more than a ghostly presence in the eyes of their Jewish contemporaries. While we have a great deal of scholarship on the Jews of Spain and Portugal prior to 1496, and then again from 1917 until our own day, most studies dealing with the intervening years focus on the Inquisition, the inquisitors and their preferred tortures. We know far less about the Inquisition’s Jewish victims. The Portuguese public, like Portugal’s historians, still views their story with a certain intellectual discomfort. The declaration of the Portuguese Republic in 1910, with full freedom of religion, and the arrival of the Polish Jewish mining engineer Samuel Schwartz in Belmonte in 1917 and subsequent publication of his book on the crypto-Jews he found there (Cristãos-Novos em Portugal no Século XX), brought an end to those 400 years of “darkness.” But remarkably, until this year, Portugal lacked a Jewish museum to recover the story of those centuries. On April 17, 2005, the inauguration of the Jewish Museum of Belmonte—a tiny town in the mountains in the center of Portugal, birthplace of the discoverer of Brazil—began with all the pomp and circumstance possible in a village of 2,500 inhabitants: among the nearly 400 people present at the opening ceremonies were the mayor of Belmonte, other civic leaders from the region and the head of the regional Tourism Board, a Minister of Parliament (representing the Prime Minister), the president of the local Jewish community and representatives of the Jewish communities of Lisbon and Oporto, a representative from the Israeli Embassy, and nearly all of the Jews of Belmonte. One of several museums to be opened in Belmonte in a short period of time, the Jewish museum is part of an initiative to transform the town into a major historical center for the region. It is located in an eighteenth-century Catholic school, purchased by the municipality and totally restored to transform it into a modern Jewish museum, with a dramatic and original design. It is situated at the heart of the oldest neighborhood, where many Jewish families still live in carefully preserved stone houses. It lies just down the hill from the town’s medieval castle and the modern synagogue. The museum can be divided into three principle components, each with a diverse set of objects linked to Judaism. The most interesting of these centers on a collection of personal objects once owned by crypto-Jewish families, some of them very old, loaned by Prof. Adriano Vasco Rodrigues and his wife’s family, the Carquejas. These objects provide an exceptional record of daily life during and after the Inquisition, for example a primitively-carved wooden mezuzah that could be carried in one’s pocket. The 170-page exhibition catalog, which contains essays by eminent scholars of crypto-Jewish issues, is indispensable for understanding the original context and meaning of these objects. The second component deals with the Jewish presence in the region of Belmonte from the Roman era through the Middle Ages, with Roman-era coins from Jerusalem, a tombstone from the same period bearing an engraved menorah, and a reproduction of an engraved stone from the town’s long-gone thirteenth-century synagogue. Belmonte’s modern crypto-Jewish community is also evoked here, through a small ethnographic display on Passover rituals. The final and most moving component is a memorial, in the form of an enormous black plaque, with the full names and even ages of victims of the Inquisition from the Belmonte region. As I was able to see from visitors’ reactions, this is among the most powerful parts of the museum, and it provides one of the first public manifestations of the duty to remember, in Portugal, to bring justice to the victims of the “Holy” Inquisition’s executioners. The museum seems to have also been intended to convey aspects of the Jewish religion in general, as it contains modern and even new items of Judaica, some of them with no obvious connection to the region. It also contains an auditorium, a small library, and an embryonic Jewish studies center, named for Prof. Rodrigues, which may serve as the future seat of Jewish studies for a nearby university. The sole negative point in the museum is the lack of explanatory information in the exhibition hall. The panels give little historical context, and none are translated into English. This is also a shortcoming of the otherwise outstanding catalog, which is written in Portuguese and followed by a short Hebrew summary. It is worthy of note that this entire project was carried out by non-Jews, it was financed by non-Jews, and all of the work that made the museum’s opening possible came from non-Jews, in particular the new “Route of Ancient Jewish Quarters,” a project of the regional Tourism Board. Regardless of whether their motives were political or economic, we can consider the museum’s creators among the great friends of the Jewish people and their history, and thank them heartily for their efforts. SERGIO CASTRO PINHEIRO is President of Hanamel—Associação de Cultura Hebraica do Porto. Born in Portugal, raised in Paris, his family originated in Bragança (Trás-os-Montes), an important crypto-Jewish community and synagogue site during Barros Basto’s time. This article in French, from which it was translated by Naomi Leite, can be found on SCJS’s website, www.cryptojews.com |
Society For Crypto Judaic Studies
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