3rd meeting of young researchers at UP 1 - IJUP - Universidade do ...

Presenças Ausentes: Belmonte, o esquecimento partilhado como
tradução e narrativa
Pedro L. Almeida 1
1 Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, University of Porto, Portugal.
After the expulsion of the Jews, those who survived the Diaspora of the Diaspora were forced
to adopt the outer signs and habits of the Catholic population, while in secret maintaining the
Jewish faith and worship. Over the centuries, in few rural villages, the memory of the Jewish
pattern remained alive, although diluted in the ritual gestures and blended with catholic
practices. "They had never heard of Jews different from themselves." [1], and many thought to
be the only survivors of their people.
I will reflect upon the role of memory in the crypto-Jewish community of Belmonte (Portugal,
Cova da Beira), seeking to understand the ways of corporizing the memory through the ritual,
based on Walter Benjamin's notion of translation: situated in a beyond-communication, the
translation rises for a moment the original to a higher and purer atmosphere, where, even
without reaching the fullness of the original form, it points to a wonderfully penetrating way,
marking the fated and denied domain of reconciliation and unity of language [2]. The matter of
memory brings together the preclusion of access to a place that is infinitely the origin of the
case, and so, testimony, as evidence of true presence, continually reestablishes the being
possibilities of an ontologizing narrative, threatened by fear: in the 20th century, the Marranos
(as the «cristãos-novos» were known) still pray for the "salvation of the brothers caught up in
the house of the Inquisition" [3], and hide the lamp of Shabbat inside a clay pot. In these
contractions of traumatic memory, the «still» suggests a permanent suspension of a time that is
a form of exile. Simultaneously, repetition and undocked recalls engage a state of oblivion that
reconciles the event with the memory.
This "integration of the loss in the experience of remembering" [4] makes it possible to ground
the place of the word as dwelling space, providing an ethical encounter that Benjamin finds in
the story-teller when he says: "The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man
encounters himself." [5]
With these reflection hypotheses, we will explore the possibility of a thought that is positioned
in the non-places of the memory in order to witness a culture of invisibility and secrecy.
References:
[1] Roth, Cecil, História dos Marranos: Os judeus secretos da Península Ibérica [1931], Porto,
Civilização, 2001, p. 242.
[2] Cf. Benjamin, Walter, «La tâche du traducteur» [1923], in Oeuvres I, Paris, Gallimard, 2000, p. 254.
[3] Schwarz, Samuel, Os Cristãos-Novos em Portugal no Século XX [1925], Lisboa, Instituto de
Sociologia e Etnologia das Religiões/Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1993, p. 44.
[4] Ricoeur, Paul, La Mémoire, L'Histoire, L'Oubli, Paris, Seuil, 2000, p. 577.
[5] Benjamin, Walter, «O narrador» [1936], in Sobre Arte, Técnica, Linguagem e Política Lisboa,
Relógio d'Água, p. 57.
44 3 rd meeting of young researchers at UP