Jewish experiences and legacies in Portugal / Heranças e vivências judaicas em Portugal (original) (raw)

2017, Jewish experiences and legacies in Portugal

Dates are often the milestones we cling to when defining a scale in knowledge and feelings. In the field of Sephardic Studies, some central dates in the History of Portugal can be immediately listed. We speak of 1492, 1496/7, 1506 and 1536. Those were respectively the dates of the entrance in Portugal of the Jews fleeing from Castile, of the Portuguese banishment decree and the almost immediate forced conversion, of the terrible Lisbon massacre on April 19 and, lastly, of the establishment of the Holy Office Court, The Inquisition. Though subverting the principles of humanism, we could make an unexpected approach to the value of these dates in our History: why ponder on events over about half a millennium? Since so much time has gone by and there are almost no Jews in Portugal, what is the point of branding the dates and the memory with events and publications like the one we bring in the open, causing uncomfortable questions and situations to come up? In fact, this is not the posture of a society that likes to remember what is negative, either by masochism, or by morbid pleasure of looking at death in the eye and liking it. The tenor and the justification that lead us to want to look at Portugal’s past as a Sephardic reality, half a millennium later, lies within something much deeper, in our own consciousness. And in this depth of what is consciousness and the unconscious, some aspects need to be brought up towards a soft change of mindsets, so that we can meet again with our memory, with our identity, and with what we want to do of ourselves in the future. And rightly so, since when we look back on our memory, we do it based on choices and those choices show how we see the past, but define all the more how we will be in the present and in the future.