Sabbatai, Sebastião: immersion and dissimilation in “A balada do falso messias”

ABSTRACT

The short story “A balada do falso messias”, by the Brazilian Jewish writer Moacyr Scliar, is an anachronistic version of the arrival of Jews to Rio Grande do Sul in the early 1900s, which includes the historical character of Sabbatai Zevi. Scliar’s use of anachronism, parody and non-realistic representation, as well as the amalgamation of different literary traditions and historical references, serves to problematize the inherent conflicts within Jewish Brazilian identity. His version of the titular false messiah echoes and parodies not only the historical Zevi but also Christian and Lusophone messianic figures. By introducing a series of paradoxes and contradictions, the narrative suggests a process of Jewish immersion in Brazilian society not by assimilation, but rather by seclusion and rebellion. An analysis of the story’s implicit author presents it as the result of such process.

KEYWORDS:

• Sabbatai Zevi
• Moacyr Scliar
• Judaism
• Brazil
• Parody

Introduction

Moacyr Scliar’s short story, “A balada do falso messias”, published in a 1976 eponymous collection, follows some patterns typical of the Gaúcho author namely, the exploration of Brazilian Jewish identity, of Judaic history and themes, and the use of non-realistic literary devices. In the story, as is common in Scliar’s works in general,¹ those devices and artifices serve allegorically to illuminate a certain fundamental paradox in the lives of Jews in Brazil.

In this case, Scliar recounts the immigration of Russian Jews to the Brazilian south in the early twentieth century, as part of the short-lived attempt of Baron Hirsch and the Jewish Colonial Association to resettle Jews in agricultural communities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, which were subsequently dismantled and whose inhabitants moved to Porto Alegre. This historical event is anachronistically juxtaposed with another one from Jewish history: that of Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676), the titular false messiah who swept virtually the entire Jewish world in the seventeenth century, caused immense turmoil, and brought about one of the gravest crises in modern Jewry.

In the story, Zevi (spelled “Shabtai Zvi” in Scliar’s text) and his prophet, Nathan of Gaza (1643–1680), appear in the ship that transports the Jewish emigrants from Russia to Brazil, where they would found Barão Franck, an agricultural settlement in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. Barão Franck, it should be noted, is obviously a fictionalized version of Barão Hirsch, and possibly a nod to Jacob Frank, the self-proclaimed successor to Zevi in eighteenth century Poland.

Already on the ship, Zevi and Nathan are treated with resentment, suspicion and alienation because of their Sephardic or oriental extraction and their strange manners.² Nevertheless, upon arrival in Rio Grande do Sul, the charismatic self-proclaimed messiah preaches to the community, claims to be the messiah and urges the members to leave their homes, use the timber of their houses to build a ship and sail to Palestine.³ This happens right after hail destroys the community’s crops and bandits kill their oxen. When the bandit Chico Diabo falls sick, his men coerce Zvi, as the Jewish community’s “santo”, to come to his sickbed and cure him.⁴

The rest is recounted afterwards by Nathan of Gaza, who accompanies Zevi and manages to escape. Nathan tells how Chico Diabo died quickly upon Zevi’s arrival, after which Nathan immediately escaped. Upon hearing this, the community, led by the pragmatic Leib Rubin, decides to leave Barão Franck and settle in Porto Alegre, thus abandoning Sabbatai Zevi and his messianic zeal in favour of a petit-bourgeois life in the city. A few days later, Zevi arrives in Porto Alegre escorted by the mounted soldiers of the “Abas Largas”, who fight bandits in the frontier. One of them tells another account of Zevi’s visit to Chico Diabo’s encampment. According to his testimony, the cavalry found Zevi sitting on a rock, looking at Chico Diabo’s dead body, while Chico’s men were lying drunk on the ground and wine was to be found in abundance, Zevi presumably having transformed all liquids to wine. However credible a testimony of Zevi’s miraculous powers, this account nevertheless does not restore his standing within the community. Instead, the story ends as Zevi becomes a common member of the community and starts working for Leib Rubin, who has by now become a wealthy financier.

Allegories of the Jewish-Brazilian paradox

The story, as is common in other works by Scliar, weaves numerous historical and cultural allusions from different sources, and uses intentional anachronisms to retell the migratory story of Gaúcho Jews. The story’s recounting of the JCA settlements is, in itself, historically inaccurate, as dates and places fail to match (e.g. the Jews in the story are said to have arrived in 1906, yet the Barão Hirsch settlement, fictionalized in the story as Barão Franck, had been founded in the 1920s).

According to Nelson Vieira, this amalgam of magic realism, historical anachronism, landmarks in Brazilian history and references from the Jewish imaginary captures the “paradoxical reality”⁵ of Brazilian Jews, namely, their belonging to a small ethnic minority while being part of broad Brazilian society. It should be added that it is these elements exactly, in addition to the enigmatic tone that shrouds the whole narrative, which inevitably call for an allegorical reading. Our aim will be to describe the specific ways in which the allegorical elements in this story articulate the fundamental paradox of Jewish Brazilian life.

Vieira points to a recurring theme in Brazilian Jewish fiction, namely “the dilemma of national assimilation vs. group solidarity”.⁶ Scliar’s narratives, such as “A balada do falso messias” as well as other novels and short stories, illustrate this dilemma and other contradictions and paradoxes which stem from possessing (at least) two different, at times opposing, identities. This framework laid by Vieira is an appropriate point of departure for our analysis: the narrative indeed shows a group of Jewish immigrants who first practise religious esotericism in an isolated agrarian settlement, then opt for a secular life in the city among the gentiles. This is presumably an allegorical representation of a process undergone by Jews, i.e. from group solidarity to national assimilation.

However, the story does more than just portray this process, and its description is far from exhausting our analysis. Thus, one should naturally begin at the most deeply allegorical and least realistic element in the story – namely, the presence of Sabbatai Zevi. It is non-realistic both in its obvious, intentional historical inaccuracy and anachronism, and in Zevi’s representation as a messiah-cum-shaman possessed with magical powers. Within the context of the assimilation process, one would expect the demise of Zevi in the story to symbolize the abandonment of tradition for the sake of assimilation. Accordingly, Robert DiAntonio sees the story as “an allegorical tale of the renunciation of all that is mystical in favor of the worldly and the practical”.⁷

Yet Sabbatai Zevi cannot be seen as symbolizing just “all that is mystical” and, least of all, tradition. His episode is one of the most dramatic, traumatic and devastating in Jewish history. According to Gershom Scholem, the Sabbatean movement

was characterized by participation of the masses, intense penitential ardor and excessive mortifications accompanied by public outbursts and demonstrations of rejoicing, cessation of normal business and commerce, feverish correspondence between the Jewish communities and dissemination of imaginary news, and not infrequently also the sale of property and similar concrete preparations for departure to the Holy Land.⁸

Zevi’s conversion to Islam in 1666 caused a further crisis which was, according to Scholem, “a tragic moment in the history of Israel”.⁹

Thus, the inclusion of Sabbatai Zevi within the historical narrative of Jews in southern Brazil, and the intertwined retelling of both histories, should seemingly point to a certain trauma involving those first inhabitants of the JCA settlements. Yet other than the bandit raids that forced the Quatro Irmãos colonists to abandon the settlement in favour of Porto Alegre¹⁰ – as indeed fictionalized in “A balada do falso messias” – no such trauma is known to have occurred. The JCA settlements in Rio Grande do Sul may be considered a failed attempt at Jewish agrarian life,¹¹ but nothing in the scale of the Sabbatean crisis of the seventeenth century. The settlers in Quatro Irmãos and Barão Hirsch are not known to have adhered to any peculiar messianic faith, or to have isolated themselves religiously or otherwise, more than any other Jewish community in Brazil.

Assimilation and conversion

Within the dilemma of isolation vs. assimilation, as formulated by Vieira, Zevi presumably represents the isolationist extreme: his peculiar behaviour and preaching attract the attention of the authorities, and he nearly persuades the community to leave Brazil and sail to Palestine. Assimilation, in turn, is represented by Leib Rubin, who suggests the community move to the city and renounce its belief – not only in Sabbatai Zevi, but in the Jewish faith altogether. “O Messias já veio, está bom? Transformou a água em vinho e outras coisas,”¹² he wryly comments to his daughter Santa, who is also Zevi’s wife, when she claims her husband is the messiah. Rubin’s remark seems to end the discussion about Zevi, and the community subsequently moves to Porto Alegre.

Rubin’s sarcastic acceptance of the Christian dogma – though, ironically enough, uttered in a very Jewish brand of humour – is in fact a form of conversion. He chooses religious indifference over zeal, which in practice means submitting to the conventions of his adopted Catholic homeland. For Rubin, a typical representative of modern diasporic Judaism, this is a means of survival among the gentiles, as practising the Sabbatean cult might “provocar os anti-semitas”.¹³ In light of Leib Rubin’s diasporic attitude and his objection to Zevi, the latter’s call to leave Brazil for Palestine may be also interpreted as an allegory of Zionism.

Conversion is, indeed, a key concept in understanding the story: by converting, the Jewish immigrants are reborn as a community within Brazilian society. Zevi’s historical apostasy or conversion to Islam was the beginning of his demise, as well as the event that made him widely recognized in the Jewish world as a false messiah. In the story, quite ironically, it is not Zevi but the community who converts. Moreover, their abandonment of Zevi is not a result of his failure to show his powers and fulfil his prophecy, but quite the opposite: Leib Rubin and the rest of the community decide to leave Barão Franck just as Zevi, unbeknownst to them, eliminates the bandit menace, and does so while preforming a miracle (if we are to believe the eyewitness and/or the narrator, which we have no evident reason not to).

Zevi’s messianic extravagance gives way to petty bar tricks as he too succumbs to the mundane, moves along to Porto Alegre and starts working for Leib Rubin. As the story ends in its present time, Zevi is seen performing his regular bit, turning wine into water at the bar, an act which the bar owner considers a mere trick. The narrator, in his turn, expresses his doubts, that is, he doubts the renunciation of Zevi and still believes him to possess magical powers and perhaps actually be the messiah.¹⁴

Sabbatai and his doubles

As is often the case, no allegorical reading fits seamlessly. The figure of Sabbatai Zevi is too paradoxical for it to simplistically symbolize just one thing, and the parodic aspect of the story is multifaceted, creating multiple layers of meaning: the representation of Zevi is not only a parody of the Smyrna-born self-proclaimed messiah, but also one of Jesus. Much like the way Zevi intentionally inversed and transgressed the laws of Judaism – performing acts such as marrying a Torah scroll¹⁵ or annulling the 9th of Ab and 17th of Tammuz fasts,¹⁶ instead conducting opulent feasts – in Scliar’s story, he acts in a similar fashion toward Christianity, transforming wine to water and wearing a belt of thorns instead of a crown.

Zevi becomes a parody of Christ in the narrator’s (or, rather, the implicit author’s) imagination, as the latter has by now immersed himself within a Brazilian, Catholic worldview, and can only envision the Jewish false messiah in the image of the Christian messiah. In this context, from a Catholic perspective, one cannot help but view the historical drama of Sabbatai Zevi as the farcical, topsy-turvy reiteration of the Christian tragedy: whereas Jesus, another presumed messiah (and a false one in Jewish eyes), chose martyrdom and posthumously formed a major world religion, Zevi apostatized, lost most of his followers and made himself known as the most notorious false messiah in Judaism since antiquity.

Perhaps more than that of Jesus himself, Scliar’s Sabbatai Zevi bears the recognizable image of several well-known messianic leaders in turn-of-the-century Brazil who led isolationist communities and engaged in warfare with State forces: personages such as Antônio Conselheiro of Canudos, the three monks of the Contestado War, etc. The ascetic, long-bearded image of Zevi is much more akin to the aforementioned figures than to the historically accepted appearance of the Jewish false messiah, and seems informed by the Brazilian imaginary at least as it is by the Jewish one. Interestingly, what those leaders had in common was the propagation of the Sebastianist cult, created in Portugal following the death of King Sebastião in a failed Northern African crusade in 1578.

Linda Hutcheon defines parody (among other definitions) as “a form of imitation […] characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text”, and as “repetition with critical distance”.¹⁷ According to Bakhtin’s broader definition, parody is the dialogical relation between two voices embedded in a single utterance, whereby “two languages are crossed with each other, as well as two styles, two linguistic points of view, and in the final analysis two speaking subjects”.¹⁸

Indeed, parody is used in “A balada” not only for the sake of ridicule, but rather to draw complex lines and parallelisms between different narratives, to have them implicitly dialogue with one another, and to present them in the light of one another: the fictional Zevi is a parody of the historical one, and is represented as a ridiculed and impotent false messiah. This parodic perspective makes us view the historical Zevi’s theological inversions as a parodic version of the Halakha. The insertion of Zevi in a Catholic country illuminates his aspect – both of the fictional and of the historical figure – as a parody of Christ and, by extension, as a (Jewish) parody of Christ-like Sebastianists in modern Brazil who, in this light, appear as a parody themselves – as, ultimately, every messianic pretender who is revealed, by consensus, to be a false messiah is a parodic, farcical reiteration of the original, prophetic messiah.

In a sense, Sebastianist messianism has been similarly devastating for the Lusophone civilization as Sabbateanism has been to Judaism. The juxtaposition of both in Scliar’s story, though not explicit, is by all means meaningful. Curiously, it has been claimed that Portuguese Marranos in Smyrna played a key role in the rise of Sabbateanism,¹⁹ and the sonic resemblance between the two sects is a curious coincidence. Either way, historical occurrences in the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – the expulsion and mass conversions of Spanish Jews and the loss of Portuguese sovereignty under the Iberian Union, respectively – were arguably instrumental in the rise of both sects. Yet, to determine whether there has been a historical link between Sebastianism and Sabbateanism is beyond our scope. What is relevant, though, is the traumatic, turbulent impact those two beliefs have had on their respective cultures – Lusophone and Jewish.

As these references were surely familiar to the author, it may well be argued that Sabbatai Zevi is evoked in the story as a sort of a Jewish equivalent of the Sebastianist cult leader figure, which allegorically bares a highly disruptive potential within his society. If so, the character of Zevi can no longer be seen as an allegory of Jewish dissimilation from Brazilian society, but rather as an expression of a broader and complex process of immersion in Brazilian society, culture and imaginary. It is a paradoxical process, as much of what characterizes Brazilian society lies not in cultural uniformity but rather in its heterogeneity, including many an example of isolationism, separatism, attempted secessions, revolutions and rebellions throughout its history.

This tendency is also akin to the concept of “culture of personality” or “personalismo”, suggested by Sérgio Buarque in Raízes do Brasil²⁰ as a defining national characteristic of Brazil and part of its Iberian heritage. According to Buarque, the result of this characteristic is the “tepidity of the forms of organization, of all of the associations which imply solidarity and order among these peoples”,²¹ as well as a “lack of cohesion in our social life” and a tendency toward anarchy and disorder.²² In this light, the Jewish community’s Sabbatean rebellious episode may be its most Brazilian moment.

The immersed implicit author

Exactly to what degree the narrator, as well as the implicit author of “A balada do falso messias” are immersed in Brazilian culture can be inferred from the numerous allusions to Gaúcho history in the text: the narrator compares the ship that the community, under Zevi’s influence, would build and sail uponto Palestine, to that of Bento Gonçalves, alluding to an episode from the Ragamuffin War. Other characters bear the names of historical figures from Rio Grande do Sul: Chico Diabo, the bandit, is the namesake of a renowned Paraguayan War Gaúcho soldier; Gumercindo, Chico’s lieutenant, is likely named after Gumercindo Saraiva, a militant from the 1890s Federalist Revolution of Rio Grande do Sul. The “Abas Largas” cavalry that fights bandits in the Riograndense frontier is the nickname of the first Mounted Rural Police Regiment of Rio Grande do Sul, founded in the 1950s (according to the state Military Brigade website as of May 27, 2022). It is also the title of a 1965 Western-style film set in the southern state. The many regional references surely intensify the fragmentary image of Brazil implicit in the story.

Evidently, all these references are inserted anachronistically in the narrative and, in some cases, bare little or no relation to the actual historical figures. This suggests an implicit author – the same entity responsible for naming the various characters and placing Zevi in an immigrant ship destined to Brazil – who is immersed, perhaps somewhat subconsciously, in Brazilian and Gaúcho history, in addition to the Jewish heritage of his (presumed) ancestors, whose story he retells.

Moreover, the story’s amalgamation of various literary genres and traditions – namely, those of Jewish Eastern Europe and those of Latin America – along with the aforementioned allusions to both Jewish and Brazilian histories and lore, represent a multi-faceted identity, that of a Brazilian, an Ashkenazi Jew, a Gaúcho, and a South American, not unlike that of Scliar himself. The story’s brand of fantasy is reminiscent both of the magic realism associated with contemporary Latin American prose and of Hassidic narratives on various miracle working rabbis. The bandits who raid the town evoke not only those in Rio Grande do Sul and the Argentine pampas, but also the pogroms in Eastern Europe’s shtetls carried out by Russian and Ukrainian Cossacks, as depicted in Yiddish and Hebrew literature.

Rather than being an allegory in the strict sense, the story’s various and often-contradicting sources and references illuminate the makings of a Brazilian Jew. It is indeed a paradoxical existence, as, perhaps, is being Brazilian in general. It appears that any attempt at defining what is Brazilian is prone to contradiction, which makes paradox and irony more apt than other means to do so. If, for Oswald de Andrade, “Só a antropofagia nos une” – that is, the ability to draw from other sources, the thing that unites Brazilians in “A balada do falso messias”, whether Catholic, Sebastianist or Sabbateanist, is the desire to rupture, to break away from the majority. Thus, only when the Jewish community of Barão Franck have had their own history of rebellion, their own Jewish Antônio Conselheiro, can they finally become Brazilian.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Prof. Nelson H. Vieira and Prof. Ruth Fine for their help in writing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eviatar Oren

Eviatar Oren (1992) has recently completed his M.A. studies at the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is a translator. He graduated from the Department of Linguistics and from AMIRIM, the Interdisciplinary Honors Program in the Humanities, at the Hebrew University. Eviatar’s interests include Brazilian, Hispano-American and Spanish narrative, literary linguistics, narratology and pragmatics. His M.A. thesis is about the phenomenology of language in the short stories of João Guimarães Rosa.

Notes

1 Vieira, “Judaic Fiction in Brazil,” 36–37.

2 Scliar, “A balada do falso messias,” 266.

3 Ibid., 269.

4 Ibid., 270.

5 Vieira, 37.

6 Ibid., 31.

7 DiAntonio, “The Brazilianization of the Yiddishkeit Tradition,” 46.

8 Scholem, Sabbatai Ṣevi, 1626–1676, 468.

9 Ibid., 693.

10 Falbel, “Jewish Agricultural Settlement in Brazil,” 329–330.

11 Ibid., 334.

12 Scliar, 271.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., 272.

15 Scholem, 159.

16 Scholem, 237, 473.

17 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 6.

18 Bakhtin, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” 76.

19 See Barnai, “Christian Messianism and the Portuguese Marranos”.

20 Buarque de Holanda, Raízes do Brasil, 36.

21 Ibid., 37.

22 Ibid., 38.