-Alex Shoumatoff
 
 

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My mother's family has a talent for the improbable. This is something I only came to appreciate when I tried to chart the paths that led my Melo and Oliveira ancestors from Iberia to sleepy little towns on the Cear-Paraiba border in Northeast Brazil. 

Mine is not a complete map. The paths twist, turn and often vanish. When I began my quest for my elusive ancestors, almost thirty years ago, all I had to go on was a watch and a prayer. The watch had belonged to my grandfather's, Joo Laurentino Melo, son of Laurentino Jose Cabea de Melo. It had a rampant lion engraved inside its lid and it was said to be a family heirloom; the prayer was my grandmother's, who passed it on to me when I turned thirteen.  She told me that traditionally, it was passed on from father to son, but her father had taught it to her cautioning not to repeat it before strangers. She was the eldest daughter and so was I.

A decade or so later, I had moved to Shepherdstown, West Virginia when I met Zohara Muchinsky Boyd, a Holocaust survivor from Poland.  It surprised me how quickly we bonded, considering the cultural differences I believed to exist between Catholic Brazil and Jewish Breslau. 

It turned out that as children we had read some of the same books and that some of her mother's domestic habits were very much like my own mother's, which we took to be nothing more than universal mommyisms, but what absolutely awed me, was Zohara's kindness. 

I quizzed her about her values. She told me that her Jewish upbringing shaped her and that kindness was the heart of Judaism.  It was to honor Zohara that I went to my first Rosh Hashanah service. There I found out that my grandmother's secret prayer was
the U'Netaneh Tokef Kedushat Hayom, Let Us Tell How Utterly Holy This Day Is.

"On Rosh Hashanah it will be inscribed and on Yom
Kippur it will be sealed how many will pass from
the earth and how many will be created; who will
live and who will die; who will die at his
predestined time and who before his time; who by
water and who by fire, who by sword, who by
beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by
storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and
who by stoning. Who will rest and who will
wander, who will live in harmony and who will be
harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will
suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be
enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted."

The puzzlement of  Judaic tradition existing in what seemed to be a Catholic family, stayed with me for many years. As I continued to inform myself about Judaism, it became clear to me that my family followed many Judaic-based practices--just how many I would not find out until the advent of the internet. I had never heard of New Christians, Marranos, Conversos, Anoussim or Crypto-Jews until I posted a message on a Jewish website asking if anyone had information on the Jewish roots of the Oliveira, Melo, Barros, Pereira, Dantas, Bezerra, Nunes, Sousa, and Monteiro families from Northeast Brazil. Bob Feron, head of the translation section at the Brazilian Embassy, responded. He was a member of Kulanu, Hebrew for all of us, an outreach group whose goal is to find and assist dispersed remnants of the Jewish people. Bob put me in touch with Karen Primack, editor of the
Kulanu Newsletter, and Jack Zeller, Kulanu's president. They, in turn, led me to Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn, whose rabbinical thesis dealt with Brazilian crypto-Jews and who is a leading authority on the subject. I also heard from Professor Judith Laiken, in the American
Southwest, Crypto-Judaism  scholar Schulamith Halevy, and journalist Inacio Steinhardt, in
Israel. An intense exchange of e-mail  followed  and for the first time I became aware of a  part  of history, consistently left out of  Brazilian textbooks.

Folk traditions say that Jews arrived in Iberia as traders and settlers, in King Solomon's ships. That tradition also maintains that Jews came to Iberia following the  Babylonian Captivity.  Jewish historian Josephus quotes Greek geographer Strabos, to prove following the destruction of the Second Temple, Jewish migration extended to every corner of the known world. But there exists proof of Jewish presence in Spain, in the 3rd Century BCE and in Portugal, the 6th. Century, CE. Judaism was a religio licita, a legal religion, throughout the Roman Empire, but once the Visigoths supplanted the Romans as rulers of
Iberia and converted to Christianity, things took an ugly turn.  In 615 Visigothic King Sisebut ordered that Jews who refused to convert be given a hundred lashes. Should they continue to resist, all their property would be confiscated and they would be banished. Sisebut also instituted the death penalty for Jews who reverted to Judaism, thus creating the need for Jews to hide their true religious identity.

In the 8th. Century, the Islamic invasion of Spain ended Visigothic rule and inaugurated an
era of deliverance. For approximately seven centuries, Jews were able to worship openly.
However, as Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella supplanted Islamic rulers, in 1492,
conversion obsession took hold in Spain.

Non-Christians were no longer protected minorities. Faced countless sanctions, many Jews
and Moslems outwardly embraced Christianity while continuing to follow Judaism and Islam in secret.

By 1492, the Christians' crusading zeal reached a climax. Jews and Moslem had to convert or leave. Approximately 175, 000 Jews chose to leave.  For a hefty fee, King Joao II allowed 600 wealthy Jewish  families to come to stay in Portugal for eight months. He later he changed his mind and offered them a choice to convert or become slaves. He ordered the children of those who refused conversion to be sent to the island of Sao Tome, in West Africa. Nearly all the children died.

Joao's successor, Manuel, freed the Jewish slaves. He seemed to have no interest in forcing his subjects to adopt Christianity until he decided to marry a Spanish princess, the daughter
of Ferdinand and Isabella. She agreed to do so if he rid Portugal of the Jews. Manuel was not enchanted with that idea. He needed literate subjects with good administrative skills and with contacts at major commercial centers throughout the world. His solution was to kidnap and baptize Jewish children between the ages of four and fourteen. Parents who refused 
baptism would never see their children again. As the Jews continued to resist, he told them they could leave the country if they assembled in Lisbon. When they did, some were dragged to baptismal founts, others were simply sprinkled with holy water.

This made them  Christians in the eyes of the king and in the eyes of the pope. It was 1497,
the year my ancestors went underground as Jews.  They became New Christian, in the parlance of the time. Later they would be known as Anoussim, the Hebrew word for the forced, Marranos, the Spanish word for pig, Crypto-Jews, and, pejoratively, Jews without a Past. There is great irony in the latter appellation given that many of their Judaic traditions would endure for five hundred years.

My maternal grandmother was gravelly ill, and geographically out of reach, by the time I had talked with enough people and read enough books to be able to identify the traditions she passed on to my mother and to me. Some practices were altered, such as the celebration of the holiday of Succoth when Jews build a succah, a shelter covered in greenery. My mother's family retreated into the woods and planted trees unknown in ancient Israel--bananas and papayas--around their succah. Following the death of a relative, they emptied all containers of water in the house, and then they washed and groomed the corpse and dressed it in a winding sheet. On the way to the cemetery, the wailed as they walked behind the coffin, listing the deceased's qualities in heart
rending laments. Their first meal, after a funeral, included an egg, a symbol of mourning--my mother fasts and does  not eat meat for days following a death in the family. They sat shivah, the seven day morning period, but rather than sit on low benches, as normative Judaism requires, they reclined in hammocks. They remained in seclusion for a week and during that time they would comb their hair. The men would not shave and the women kept their heads covered with a shawl. Every one of their life cycle ceremonies included some remnant of their Judeo-Iberian past. For example, when I was born, relatives perfumed my clothes with the smoke of burning lavender blossoms and my mother placed gold jewelry to the water in which I had my first bath.

It took David Gitlitz years to compile the Crypto-Jewish practices for Secret and Deceit, his 505 page-long compendium of Crypto Jewish practices had yet to appear when I prepared a list of questions for my mother, Josefa de Melo Castelar, who is a good, if occasionally reluctant source. At seventy nine she is very much taken with the present as races from a class to another, in Fortaleza, Ceara, constantly searching for a new outlet for her apparently inexhaustible creative energy. She agreed to talk about her  family, but she did not know her father very well. She was three when he left her mother and resettled in Mato Grosso. She was closer to her Oliveira and Bezerra--B'tzur, in Hebrew--relatives whose property straddles the Cear-Paraiba border.  Before he died, my grandfather, Joo Laurentino Melo, sent  me four handwritten pages on his genealogy. He also wrote
lyrical descriptions of my great-great-parents' farmhouses. There was no discussion of his people's religion.

It has never been sexy to be Jewish in Brazil. Besides inheriting the Iberian obsession with
purity of blood--Jews, Moslem and Brazilian Indians were known as racas infectas, infected races, in Colonial Brazil--many Brazilians grew up hearing Jews described as  Christ killers.  Google the word judeu, Jew, and more Brazilian hate sites pop up than references to Jesus. In a bizarre example of the oppressed turning on the equally oppressed,  many Brazilians of color blame slavery on the Jews and the internet is a
convenient repository for much of their misdirected anger.  But it is not only those with
spurious grievances who wax anti-Semitic. The Portuguese language itself reflects a cultural
bias again Jews.  Recently, publishers of the Aurlio, Brazil's most popular dictionary finally
saw fit to remove an entry that equates Jews with evil, but to many Brazilians, Jew means usurer, exploiter. As far as I know, the word safado, which derives comes from the word sefardita, Shephardic, and which means dishonest rascal will remain in the dictionary. So will the verb judiar, which means to torment, to mistreat, to torture, will apparently remain in place.

Antonio Pereira de Almeida's Dona Adriana do Santa Rosa, a hagiography of Adriana de Oliveira Ledo, daughter of pioneer Teodosio de Oliveira Ledo, makes no mention of Jewish roots. Almeida bemoans the difficulty of finding Adriana's ancestor Bartolomeu Ledo, "a man of somewhat humble origins."  He goes on to say that in 1594, Bartolomeu had been summoned by the Inquisition to "due to his marriage to a Brazilian Indian mestiza."  His brother-in-law, Manuel de Oliveira, son of Jorge de Albuquerque Coelho, was summoned at the same time, and so was Bartolomeu's wife, Ana Lins, whose grandparents were Francisco Caldas, reputed to be a vicious enslaver of Native Brazilians, and a Brazilian Indian woman. Her parents were Filipa Roiz (Rodrigues) and a German aristocrat, Roderich Linz, of the Linz von Dorndorff house of Ulm, Bavaria.   Roderick  Linz, arrived in Brazil around 1550. He was the son of Hans Lins, whose father was Zimprecht Lins, son of Konrad Linz, and Ursula Scheffer grandson of Johan or Hans Linz. The latter was the son of Albrecht Linz, whose father was Heinrich Linz.  Zimprecht married Bárbara Gienger, in Ulm, Bavaria, in 1490. She was the daughter of Mathaeus Gienger and  Úrsula Hutz, paternal granddaughter of  nobleman Jacob  Gienger, and  maternal granddaughter of  Hans Hutz, who lived in Bavaria in 1380, and whose
father was also called Heinrich Linz. The Bavarian Linzes descend from Heinrich der Linzer, registered  in Ulm, 1296.

Whether intentional or unintentional, there is a certain amount of obfuscation going in Almeida's book.  It is unclear whether the Jorge to whom he refers  was the son of Duarte Coelho Pereira or Jeronimo de Albuquerque's, but he seems to be certain that Jorge's mother was a Brazilian Indian, brought up by Brites de Albuquerque. There is nothing humble about the Albuquerques. They  were old Iberian nobility linked by marriage to the royal houses of Portugal and Spain. So says Armorial Lusitano, which lists Portuguese aristocrats and their crests.  Brites married explorer  Duarte Coelho Pereira, the illegitimate son of  navigator Gonalo Coelho and his Portuguese mistress, Ana Catarina Duarte, of
the Minho aristocracy. Gonalo may have been a Jew, but only one of my sources hints at that possibility. Whatever his religious background, he seems to have cherished Duarte Coelho Pereira. 

Together they took part in the 1503 exploratory expedition Brazil financed by New Christians such as Fernando de Noronha. Goncalo provided the
navigational skills he had acquired in Pisa and  Americo Vespucci drew maps of the recently discovered land. Map in hand,  the King of Portugal carved up Brazil into fifteen
capitanias, hereditary fiefs. He gave the first to Noronha. In 1553,  he rewarded Duarte Coelho Pereira's services to the Crown in Goa, Siam and the South China Sea by granting him the capitania of Pernambuco-- 60 miles of coastal land. The newly appointed donatrio, proprietary landlord,  founded Olinda and brought Jewish technicians from  Madeira to help develop Pernambuco's sugar industry. He subdivided the land,  part of which went to the Old Christian Joao Pais Barreto.   Bartolomeu Ledo fetched up  at Barreto's mill at Cabo Santo Agostinho . Though the author of Dona Adriana claims that Bartolomeu's origins
were "somewhat humble," Armorial Lusitano describes the Ledos as "a family of apparent
Spanish origin, adding that "Fernandes Ledo,  father of Bartolomeu Ledo was one of the
principal figures of Ponte de Lima,  in Portugal's  Minho, in the late 1500s, sufficient
time for to blur genealogical details.