RCAAP Repository

Nueva literatura de ficción, fusión entre rap, hip hop y melodías ancestrales, cine plagado de ironías y perdedores entrañables, varenikes combinados con bife de chorizo, Woody Allen y Philip Roth pero también Nicole Krauss y Jonathan Kesselman para conformar el panorama actual de la cultura judía en la Argentina y en el mundo: incorrecta, atravesada por la diáspora, fusionada con las culturas locales de la emigración, más allá de los clásicos de las fiestas rituales y la liturgia religiosa. ¿QUIÉN ES JUDÍO? La respuesta se ubica entre la liberalidad de las costumbres y los credos y las férreas convicciones de la ortodoxia más radicalizada que combate toda transgresión.

Our contribution aims at a comparativ analysis of the folk tales “O tesouro” ("The treasure"; אוצרדער) and “Olhos baixos” ("Downcast eyes"; אויגןפגעלוסטעאראָ) by Itzhok Leibusch Peretz (1852-1915), in light of the theory of marvelous tales, proposed by Vladimir Propp (1895-1970).

This paper aims to make an intersemiotic analysis about the Jewish memory and exile in the novel The fixer, by Jewish American writer Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), published in 1966, and in some pictures of the Jewish Russian painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985), for example: Exodus (from 1952-1956), The White Crucifixion (from 1938), I and my Village (from 1911). In spite of they had been raised up in distinct Jewish generations, Malamud (son of Jewish Russian immigrants that went to the United States) and Chagall (immigrated to France), both take as theme the home-place from where originated their families, the shtetl (small village, in Yiddish). The shtetlekh were small cities demarcated in Poland and Russian during the ninth and twenty centuries; centers of the Jewish religious and cultural life. For many immigrated European Jews and their descendants, the shtetl became the nostalgic, primordial and mythical place, in spite of the destruction occasioned by the pogroms and the Holocaust. For this reason, art’s men as Malamud and Chagall recreated the shtetl’s life in their works, having recourse to the zekher, the collective and the individual memory of the Jewish people, whose transmission occurs by means of the ritual and the narrative. Therefore, the memory recreates time and space, transgressing chronologies; this mnemonic phenomenon is showed in the Malamudian novel The fixer and the Chagallian picture, because both artists searched the oniric universe and the unconscious, Surrealism’s elements. Furthermore, Malamud and Chagall take as theme the exile suffered by the Jewish people deconstructing the use of the crucifixion of Christ as anti-Semitic pretext. Malamud makes it through the character Yakov Bok, anti-hero that lives individually a self-exile under the implications of the historical and collective exile of the Jewish people. Likewise, Chagall makes it, according to his vision, by means of the recreation the Ahasuerus legend, the wandering Jew

The Jewish culture is based in strong familiar traditions, most of them religious, which added to the gregarious character of their faith, as the always necessary minyan of ten men for the celebration and worship, it has succeeded keep united their groups in the middle of different cultures. All the needs of the Jewish worship and the wide power of the tradition have created certain cohesion of group, however, elements originated of the cultures in contact somewhat have influenced the Jewish minorities, adding new elements or changing some of their daily practices. The book Os dispersos, a collection of seven short stories, from the Brazilian writer Janette Fishenfeld, focuses these contacts and the conflicts created by them: a couple that understand that it is impossible to be together, separated by the tradition; the old Zeide, the grandpa, inmate of a home for old people, that remembers the past, in the moment that he goes to the brit-milah of his great-grandson, among his assimilated family – those and other situations in which the Jewish traditions crash against the new life possibilities in Brazil and among the Brazilian culture, and their needs of adaptation for survive. This article intends to present how this writer recreates in her text all this situations of acculturation, assimilation and the conflicts with the Jewish tradition.

A Consolação às Tribulações de Israel (1553) by Samuel Usque is the main literary testimony of the expulsion and dispersion that the Portuguese Jews were submitted, beginning in the year of 1531. With a memory inclination, this work explores the tragedy and the exile that the religious intolerance and the action of the Inquisition imposed to the Iberian Jews. In his text, Samuel Usque comments that the real consolation is obtained by comparing the last evils with the experiments in the present. Such intention took the author to revisit the suffered tragedies by the Hebrew people, since the biblical times to the time of the persecutions of the Inquisition.

This article was conceaved with the objective of presenting rabin Mossen Rephael d'Aguilar, in particular its Treatise of the soul's immortality and The discourse of magic Hebrew alphabet. Although the precise date or place in which the texts were written aren’t known (if it was in Amsterdam or Recife), these texts allow us further comprehension of the renaissance context as well as the Jewish Sephardi culture of the period, characterized by its dread of the Inquisition, by despair, by Marranism and by mental reserve.

The 24 years when the Dutchmen occupied the northeast of Brazil (1630-1654) were treated by classical historiography as a period of relative religious tolerance. The Jews were considered allied politicians of the Dutchmen and were important in the creation of new commercial enterprises, mainly by dominating Portuguese and Dutch languages. The communal life was fortified 1641, with the arrival of the rabbis Isaac Aboab da Fonseca and Raphael d’Aguilar, who left also a literary inheritance: Aboab da Fonseca, is not only the first rabbi of the Americas, but is also considered the first Jewish author in Hebrew of the New World with Mi Chamocha, prayer composed describing the community suffering while surrounded by the Portuguese fleet. In the present text we are going to approach biographical aspects of the referred author, inserting his literary production within the situation of that Brazilian historical period.

The book Déjalo, ya volveremos, by Esther Bendahan, 2006, tells the story of a Sephardic Jewish family that migrates from Tetuam, Morocco, to Madrid. From the perspective of Reina’s character, the book weaves complex situations about her family’s integration in Spain. The theme of integration and cultural assimilation can be seen as a poignant question to be addressed in this novel. This is true particularly for Reina who suffers from prejudices and from being casted out, never belonging to any of the spaces in which she circulates. In an attempt to reflect upon the idea of integration, we seek to better understand this concept taking into consideration the novel written by Bendahan, the essays Integration Images by Hugo Achugar, and the work by Regina Igel called “Acculturation and Assimilation”. It was also considered the novel solutions presented in Reina’s fantasies regarding this issue

Since Latin Middle Ages, rational-natured philosophical trends have confronted its fidelity to tradition. The Spain of the medieval and Renaissance periods maintained a tendency that was close to a communal understanding of the traditions, thanks to the preservation of specific exegetical rabbinic practices of the medieval that influenced the concept of language in use. Similarly, in the central Europe of the beginning of the twentieth century, one can observe a return to biblical exegesis as a needed rescue of the occult tradition of the West. The comparative study of both figures, a Hispanic and an Austrian one – Juan de Valdes (1504-1541) and Martin Buber (1878-1965) – illustrates the link between language and community. The same way Valdés considers language an experience of usage responsible for the formulation of meanings, Buber asserts that the reference of the meaning is not the word, but the community.

This article analyzes the play Assirei atikvá, by Isaac Penço Felix. Written in the previous little date to 1668, when it was published its first edition, close to Spanish molds, the drama presents the types of "King", "Devil" and "Wisdom". According to the canons of the genre, in the end, the forces of evil are defeated, recognizing the superiority of the forces of good.

Sex, outrage, shock, and satiric humor have become Philip Roth's trademark, which this essay discusses in relation to ten of his novels, from Portnoy's Complaint (1969) to Nemesis(2010).

De la lectura de los poemas que componen el libro Memorias de Sefarad, de Leonor Scliar-Cabral, que mostraron varias características de la tradición sefardí, tenemos la intención de abordar el fenómeno de los “marranos”. En el siglo XV, al tiempo que establecía la designación de “cristiano nuevo” a la judío convertido por orden de los reyes de España, la etiqueta de “marrano” ‒ lo que implica que fingió conversión al catolicismo, mientras se mantenga la práctica ilegal de la fe judía ‒parece infiltrarse lentamente en el imaginario construido en torno a los judeoespañoles. Así, lo que podría limitarse a un episodio en la historia del pueblo judío parece moverse en el tiempo y el espacio, y lo acompaña en la Diáspora, de la sombra de los tribunales de la Inquisición hasta la actualidad. Secree que la literatura puede ofrecer un espacio para el cuestionamiento de lo marranismo como performance, en la medida en que, en el campo del lenguaje, como se verá en la poesía de Scliar-Cabral, permite un diálogo entre pasado y presente como una estrategia de resistencia.

E veio o dilúvio sobre a terra...

Passatempos bíblicos...

E sempre, em meu olhar, o mesmo rosto...

Grande conforto esta visão da noite...

Resenha a: AGUINIS, Marcos. A saga do marrano. Trad. Hugueta Sendacz. São Paulo: Editora Página Aberta Ltda, 1996. 490p.

Resenha a: WALDMAN, Berta. O teatro ídiche em São Paulo: memória. Introdução de Jacó Guinsburg. São Paulo: Casa Guilherme de Almeida; Annablume, 2010. 86p.

Abrahão e Sara

Menuha Nehona, originally published in Israel in1982and released in Brazil only in 2010under the title Uma certa paz, the internationally acclaimed book by Amos Oz, focuses on the interval between the years1965and 1967, immediately prior to the Six Days War that modified the State of Israel in a radical way. It was after this war that Israel developed a craving for the occupied territories and began to use military force as a means of achieving them. Violence and confrontation between the characters themselves and the society provides ethical questions that go beyond the thematic plane, being present in building strategies of the novel, culminating in polyphony, which is more elaborate and radically evident in Oz’s posterior novel A caixa preta.