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ABSTRACT
This article analyzes some of the data collected during an anthropological research carried out among Jews, crypto-Jews and their descendants from Bragança, Portugal. In view of the growing interest in the Jewish heritage in the country, Bragança has also revived its Jewish legacy and is decorated with new Jewish cultural spaces in recent years. The study describes what were the authenticity and significance premises set by the official agents involved in this construction and also the Brigantines´ role and perceptions in the process, reflecting on the ‘engaging heritage’ notion considering four local sites.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. See, for eg., Francisco Manuel Alves [Abade de Baçal], Memórias Arqueológico-Históricas do Distrito de Bragança – Os Judeus do Distrito de Bragança, vol. V (Bragança: Câmara Municipal de Bragança – Museu Abade Baçal, 2000 [1925]); Júlio Caro Baroja, Los judios en la Espanã Moderna y Contemporanea (Madrid: Arión, 1961); Amílcar Paulo, Romanceiro Cripto-Judaico: subsídios para o estudo do folclore marrano (Bragança: Escola Tipográfica, 1969); Claude Stuczynski, “Between Religion and Religiosity. Converso Judaizers of Braganca and the Inquisition of Coimbra in the 16th century” (Ph.D. diss, Bar Ilan University, 2005); Samuel Schwarz, Os cristãos novos em Portugal no século XX (Lisboa: Instituto de Etnologia e de Sociologia das Religiões, UNL, 1993 [1925]); or José Leite de Vasconcelos, Etnografia Portuguesa, vol. IV, parte II – ‘Grupos Étnicos’ (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1982 [1958]).
2. Marina Pignatelli, Cadernos de Orações Cripto-Judaicas e Notas Etnográficas de Judeus e Cristãos-Novos de Bragança (Lisbon: Etnográfica Press, 2019). Many of these Brigantine residents however, perceive themselves as descendants of New Christians or Marranos rather than normative Sephardi Jews. These identification categories will not be explored here, as they have been analyzed with some length in my monography.
3. Memorial Bragança Sefardita, 2021, http://www.sefarad-braganca.com/pt/sobre/ (accessed May 10, 2021).
4. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). The concept of ethnoscape was conceived by Appadurai to refer to one of the contemporary faces of the planet, which corresponds to the landscape formed by individuals on the move and who constitute the world in movement or the current fabric of humanity in transit, whether emigrants, exiles, refugees, tourists, expatriates, or other travelers.
5. The impacts on tourists will not be analyzed.
6. Rede de Judiarias de Portugal (RJP), “Home page,” https://www.redejudiariasportugal.com/index.php/pt/ (accessed March 18, 2021).
7. Celeste Amaro, “Rotas de Sefarad valorizam a identidade judaica portuguesa e dinamizam o diálogo interculturas,” Passear.com, July 26, 2016, https://www.passear.com/2016/07/cinco-milhoes-de-euros-para-revitalizar-o-patrimonio-cultural-judaico/ (accessed March 18, 2021).
8. Rotas de Sefarad, “Rotas de Sefarad: valorização da identidade judaica portuguesa no diálogo interculturas,” País Positivo – Suplement of the Diário de Notícias and Jornal de Notícias), no. 101 (January 2017): 3. http://www.redejudiariasportugal.com/sefarad/images/JN-DN.pdf (accessed March 18, 2021).
9. Anna Karlström, “Authenticity: Rhetorics of Preservation and the Experience of the Original,” in Heritage Keywords, ed. Kathryn Lafrenz and Trinidad Rico (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2015), 32.
10. Ruth Ellen Gruber, “Beyond Virtually Jewish: New Authenticities and Real Imaginary Spaces in Europe,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 487–504.
11. Ibid., 490–1.
12. No recognizable Jewish person (from Bragança or outsider) is found in the technical file of the exhibit´s team displayed at the ICSC´s entrance. See also: Susana Milão, “Cultura Sefardita do Nordeste Transmonta- no – Um Centro de Interpretação”, CEPIHS, 6 (2017): 309-314..
13. Stuart Hall, “Un‐settling ‘the heritage’, re‐imagining the post‐nationWhose heritage?” Third Text13, no. 49 (1999): 3–13.
14. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 [1985]), 27.
15. João Leal, Etnografias Portuguesas (1870–1970). Cultura Popular e Identidade Nacional (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2000).
16. Maria Cardeira da Silva, “Castles Abroad. Nations, Culture and Cosmopolitanisms in African Heritage Sites of Portuguese Origin,” in Heritage Regimes and the State, ed. Regina F. Bendix, Aditya Eggert and Arnika Peselmann (Göttingen: Göttingen Studies in Cultural Property, vol. 6, Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2012), 61–78.
17. Maria Cardeira da Silva, “O sentido dos árabes no nosso sentido. Dos estudos sobre árabes e sobre muçulmanos em Portugal,” Análise Social XXXIX, no. 173 (2005): 781–806.
18. Gilberto Freyre. Casa Grande e Sanzala (São Paulo: Global Editora, 2003 [1933]): 280;290; Gilberto Freyre. O mundo que o português criou (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1940). In both these works, Freyre promoted the Lusotropicalist miscegenation ideology, assuming that the Portuguese, due to their own hybrid ethnic origin, their multi-continentality and their long experience of coexistence, living side by side with the Moors and the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, are innately prone to cultural interpenetration and mixture. Freyre wrote: ‘To these elements the Semite-Phoenicians are added (…) and among more recent invaders, the Jews, Berbers, Moors, Germans, Blacks, Flemish, English’. Freyre, Casa Grande, 280. And he added: ‘To what extent the Portuguese blood, already very Semitic, by remote infiltrations of Phoenicians and Jews (…). Ibid., 290.’ The ideology pervaded and was enhanced in Portuguese colonialism and the Estado Novo (1933–1974). After the Second World War, Salazar’s regime used a simplified version of Freyre’s miscegenation theory, however, extolling the virtues of the particularly good ‘Portuguese ways of being in the world’, albeit marginalizing the Jewish contribution, tamed by hegemonic Christianity. This subtly philosephardic concept was and is still being instrumentalized in today’s Portuguese official (political-historiographical) national discourse. And yet, despite all the contingencies, New Christians and Jews have always remained living in our country.
19. Nancy D. Munn, The fame of Gawa: a symbolic study of value transformation in Massim (Papua New Guinea) society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Susanne Küchler, “Sacrificial Economy and Its Objects: Rethinking Colonial Collecting in Oceania,” Journal of Material Culture 2, no. 1 (1997): 39–60.
20. Nezar AlSayyad, Hybrid Urbanism: On the Identity Discourse and the Built Environment (Westport, CT.: Praeger Publishers, 2001); Yorke Rowan and Uzi Baram, eds. Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past (Walnut Creek, Calif.; Oxford: Altamira, 2004).
21. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 4.
22. Antoinette Jackson, “Changing ideas about heritage and heritage resource management in historically segregated communities,” Transforming Anthropology 18, no. 1 (2010): 80–92.
23. Lisanne Havinga, Bernard Colenbrander, and Henk Schellen, “Heritage significance and the identification of attributes to preserve in a sustainable refurbishment,” Journal of Cultural Heritage no. 43 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2019.08.011.
24. Bryony Onciul, Michelle L. Stefano, and Stephanie Hawke, Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017); Matthias Ripp, “Heritage as a system and process that belongs to local communities,” in Council of Europe (2018). Online at: https://rm.coe.int/heritage-as-a-system-and-process-that-belongs-to-local-communities-mr-/16807bc255 (accessed 12 May 2021).
25. Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London/New York: Routledge (the UNESCO (1972). Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (Paris: World Heritage Center, 2006).
26. Ibid., 6.
27. Gilberto Velho, “Anthropology and cultural heritage,” Vibrant [Online], v10n1 (2013), http://journals.openedition.org/vibrant/519 (accessed March 18, 2021).
28. Paul A. Schakel, “Pursuing Heritage, Engaging Communities,” Historical Archaeology 45, no. 1 (2011): 1–9.
29. Luc Eric Lassiter, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
30. For ethic reasons, all those who collaborated in my research were asked to choose a Hebrew name.
31. Such as Clara André, the arqueologist and the engeneer in charge of the public works from the municipality; the head of the history department and the chaplain of the Bragança Polytechnic Institute; the two former and the present director of the Abade de Baçal Museum; or the staff from the Kadoorie Mekor Haim Synagogue of Porto.
32. José Monteiro, “Sociedade e Quotidianos da Bragança Contemporânea,” in Bragança na Época Contemporânea (1820–2012), ed. Fernando de Sousa (Bragança, CEPESE/Câmara Municipal de Bragança, 2013), 290.
33. Barros Basto was an activist in the defense of the marranos and crypto-Jews he knew existed scattered throughout the Northeast of Portugal. Aiming to united them, he organized Jewish congregations in several locations in the region.
34. See .
Building of the 20th century synagogue
Building of the 20th century synagogue.
35. The correct way in the Sephardic tradition is ‘cacher’.
36. Display text posted on the new Synagogue´s entrance wall.
37. Marina Pignatelli and Amandio Felício (Coor.), Catálogo da Exposição: Os Judeus e Cristãos-Novos de Bragança – Medo e Esperança na Roda Multicultural Transmontana (Bragança: Museu do Abade de Baçal, 2019).
38. Although there is no officially recognized Jewish community in the city today, some Brigantines do have a Jewish mother and do pray and study the Torah. Others are sons or grandsons of Jews who belonged to CIB and attended ‘the 25’ and all the other Jewish festivities at home, as children. Even permeated with ‘less pure’ mainstream orthodox Judaism, and being distant from it for several decades now, many kept their family practices and mindset, ruled by fear (of antisemitism) and hope (that someday they might officially reorganize), and still gather in private homes.
39. Tinka Delakorda Kavashima, “The Authenticity of the Hidden Christians’ Villages in Nagasaki: Issues in Evaluation of Cultural Landscapes,” Sustainability 13, no. 4387 (2021), https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/8/4387/htm (accessed May 20, 2021).
40. ANTT – Inquisição de Coimbra, processo no. 7933, fol. 68., Auto de Fé de 19/12/1599.
41. Henrique Martins, “Cadeia Civil de Bragança” (July 24, 2013), https://5l-henrique.blogspot.com/2018/02/cadeia-civil-de-braganca.html?m=0 (accessed May 20, 2021).
42. See .
The well of the medieval synagogue in the Citadel
Shoemaker shop. Photo of the author, 2016
The well of the medieval synagogue in the Citadel.
43. Anne Monjaret and Mélanie Roustan, “Digestion patrimoniale,” Civilisations 61, no. 1 (2012): 23–42, http://journals.openedition.org/civilisations/3123 (accessed April 30, 2021).
44. Figure 3. Shoemaker shop. Photo of the author, 2016.
45. Anselmo Braamcamp Freire, “Povoação de Trás-os-Montes no Século XVI,” Arquivo Histórico Português III (1905): 241–73.
46. Cecil Roth, História dos Marranos (Porto: Ed. Civilização, 2001 [1932]), 156.
47. Nadia E. Kline, “Finding the Mikveh: Using technology to confirm oral histories at an early 20th century site in Portsmouth, New Hampshire” (conference talk, Seattle, Washington, Society for Historical Archaeology. tDAR id: 434042 (2015), https://core.tdar.org/document/434042/finding-the-mikveh-using-technology-to-confirm-oral-histories-at-an-early-20th-century-site-in-portsmouth-new-hampshire (accessed February 27, 2021).
48. José Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa de los judíos en España y Portugal (Madrid: Aguilar, 1960 [1875–76]): 736.
49. Pilar Herga Criado, En la Raya de Portugal. Solidaridad y tensiones en la comunidad judeoconversa (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1994).
50. See .
Stone stele of Pinelo
Stone stele of Pinelo.
51. Pignatelli, Cadernos de Orações Cripto-Judaicas, 91–134.
52. Małgorzata Trelka, “Negotiating Authority: Local Communities in the World Heritage Convention,” Archaeologies 16 (2020): 99–119, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11759-020-09391-x (accessed May 12, 2021).
53. Ping-Ann Addo, “Tourism, the Visible, the Hidden, and the Ignored in Urban Heritage Festivals,” Salzburg Global Seminar, February 28, 2021, https://www.salzburgglobal.org/news/latest-news/article/tourism-the-visible-the-hidden-and-the-ignored-in-urban-heritage-festivals.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marina Pignatelli
Marina Pignatelli is a Cultural Anthropologist and Associate Professor at the Social and Political Sciences Institute – University of Lisbon. Her research focuses on Portuguese Jews and Judaism, since 1990. She concluded a post-doctorate program on the Jews in Mozambique and is currently studying Marranos and also intangible cultural heritage in Portugal. She is the author of Crypto-Jewish Prayers Notebook and Ethnographic Notes on the Jews and New-Christians of Braganza (2019); Jews and New Christians in the Lusophone World (2017); The Jewish Community of Lisbon: Past and Present in the Construction of Ethnicity (2000); and related articles. She is a board member of the Portuguese Anthropological Association and researcher at CRIA – Centre for Research in Anthropology.