RCAAP Repository

Enlightenment

This article seeks to analyze the 1983’s film Yentl - starring and directed by Barbra Streisand - inspired by the tale of the same name by Isaac Bashevis Singer, while breaking the paradigm, by placing a woman in a position of power and owner of her own destiny in a religious environment where the position of women is restricted, connecting with the work of Barbra Streisand herself, as the protagonist and director of the film, in addition to seeing how Streisand's role as a director made room for others that came later, leaving - even more so - her name in the history of cinema.

Iconoclasm, altogether, tends to be uncritically associated with Judaism as a kind of exclusion due to prejudice or due to excessively strict observance of religious dogma. Such an association, which emerged in the Middle Ages – which fueled vast anti-Jewish literature, focused on converting Jews to Christianity – underlies a view of the Jew almost as an enemy of the visual arts, from the perspective of the spectator and the observer. But such a perspective is, of course, wrong; for iconoclasm in Judaism had many other functions and a theoretical complexity of its own. And this complexity, in a way, survived and persisted in full modernity – as we will see in the case of the avant-garde group Infra-noir, mostly Jewish, in its relations with the aesthetic and cinematographic image.

Aprenda

This article consists in an analysis of how the conflict between culture and barbarism in the great episodes of violence in recente history was able to influence the representation standards and photographic language. Two different pieces are taken as case study: Lee Miller’s portrait in Hitler’s bathtub and the view of Balaklava photographed by Roger Fenton.

This article seeks to discuss, in a succinct way, how some Jewish philosophers have reflected on the enigma of evil. Permeated with conflicts and contradictions, Jewish thinking about evil has been discussed under the ethical and metaphysical aspects, however, always starting from the monotheistic assumption characteristic of Judaism. In the first section, the article analyzes how Maimonides (1135-1204) affirms the idea of evil as a deprivation of good. The second section of the text seeks to reflect on the divine promise of salvation based on some ideas of Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) and Joseph Dov Soloveichic (1903-1993). As a final reflection, the article argues that Judaism's response to the meaninglessness of a life of suffering hides a divine plan for building a new reality pointing to the possibility of redemption.

The Genizah fragment Cambridge U-L T-S F2 (2) 23, numbered C98948 in the Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society, includes among other things the amoraic controversy between R. Eleazar and R. Jose son of R. Hanina, as well as the give and take between R. Safra and Abaye in Tractate Eruvin 103a. Some of the researchers are divided concerning the initial formation of the sugya. The controversy between R. Eleazar and R. Jose son of R. Hanina as presented in the fragment’s version poses difficulties and interferes with the ordered understanding of the methods utilized by these amoraim to solve the contradiction between the Mishna in Eruvin and the Mishna in Pesaḥim. The purpose of the article is to present the difficulties in the fragment’s version with regard to the abovementioned amoraic controversy and reach conclusions regarding the precise original version of the fragment. Thus too in the matter of the fragment’s version of the give and take between R. Safra and Abaye, which differs from other versions. The purpose of the article is to examine the fragment’s version of this give and take in comparison to other versions and reach conclusions regarding the clearest and most precise version compared to the other versions.

Sefarad, that is, the Iberian Peninsula, becomes an advanced territory, with discoveries, but above all with the Arab and Jewish testament in science, philosophy and its culture. The luggage of Arabs and Jews has an immeasurable wealth for Iberia and that will spread in the West. The most important is the rapprochement with Greek philosophy, but also with mathematics, astronomy, medicine and the art of navigation (in addition to many other sciences) are transformative poles of a native people still immersed in barbarism for their humanization and the building of Western society.

Neste espaço, serão divulgadas publicações relevantes na área dos Estudos Judaicos.      

E D’eus criou os peixes I

E D’eus criou os peixes II

Los cuatro jinetes de la corona

Review to: KERTZER, David I. O sequestro de Edgardo Mortara. Trad. Nivaldo Montigelli Jr. Rio deJaneiro: Rocco, 1998. 333p

Our article deals with the autobiographical novel Um pedaço de lua caía na mata (1990) by the Jewish writer Paulo Jacob (1921-2003). This work portrays the history of Sephardic Jewish immigration in the Amazon region through the journey of exile of the protagonist Salomão. Our thesis is that each period of your life – sailing on the boat Jerusalem and docking in Parintins – would correspond to a dimension of Jewish identity: "Hebrewism" and "Israelism", second André Neher (2007). Divided between opening up to the world or preserving his uniqueness as a Jew, the construction of a “third-space”, in the conception of Homi Bhabha (2007), uniting Jewish mystique to Amazonian folklore, allows him to transfigure this internalized conflict. Jacob thus proposes the construction of an Amazonida Jewish identity.

Mapping traces of Jewish culture in the Amazon, the article discusses pictorial art in artists still little studied in our region. The works presented propose a dialogue between our myths and legends, belonging to our imagination, confronting them with the biblical-Jewish tradition.

This article proposes to reconstruct the profile of the descendant communities of Jews living in the Amazon since the first decades of the 19th century, prioritizing the Moroccans who chose to live in Belém do Pará and Manaus. Going back in time, we try to reconstitute their daily life and Jewish practices in the host communities. We recall that, in the first decades of the 19th century, groups of these Jewish immigrants went to live far from urban centers in isolated islets, that is, in small lands surrounded by streams. On the riverbanks they lived on stilts (houses under stakes) and slept in hammocks, adapting to local customs. They celebrated the most traditional religious festivals: Pesach (Passover), Yom Kippur (Great Fast) and Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year). Initially, still without a rabbi and without Torah, the head of the house exercised the functions of hazam (liturgical singer) recreating the traditions inherited from his ancestors. A great adventure for those who did not speak Portuguese and were not used to the bad weather of a tropical country. In search of visions of this “green world”, we sought to reconstruct the traces that attest to the presence of Moroccan Jews in the Amazon, valuing their commercial houses, synagogues, graves, Jewish rites, cuisine and popular expressions.

This work aims to align the perspective of the term necropolitics with the testimonial work Maus: the story of a survivor by comic artist Art Spiegelman, son of holocaust survivors. In Art Spiegelman's comic, his father Vladek Spiegelman tells him his memories and his testimony about his times at that time, as well as his mother Anja Spiegelman and other relatives, portrayed from the beginnings of the war to his own deportations to different concentration camps in the Europe, among these Auschwitz. To carry out this survey, bibliographical research was made in order to define the concepts of necropolitics, proposed by Joseph-Achille Mbembe, resistance and testimony by Augusto Sarmento-Pantoja and Giorgio Agamben, among others.

Based on correlations between ethnographic categories, such as anthropomorphization and compadrio, associated with categories from men's tales, travel literature and shamanic narratives, this study seeks to address, in the tale “Satan, the damned feline”, one of the narratives from the Contos amazonenses, by Leão Pacifico Esaguy, the Jewish protagonism within a community relationship, marked by the record of difference, sometimes between animals and men, sometimes between caboclos and found, in the light of a plot, which in an anecdotal tone, talks about the hunt for a jaguar.

Arado

This work presents two Amazonian writers descended from Sephardic Jews who, despite not being Jews, attest to their Jewish origin. Márcio Souza and Rogel Samuel did not explain the Jewish theme in their writings but manifest their Hebrew ancestry in non-fictional contexts.