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- Title
Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: The Ambiguous Boundaries of Self-Definition.
- Authors
Bodian, Miriam
- Abstract
This article explores why the Portuguese Jews of northern Europe never established a solid sense of belonging to the wider Sephardi diaspora. It explores how, historically, the Conversos lost the consciousness of being "Sephardi" in the generations after the expulsion from Spain and the mass baptism of Portugal's Jews in 1497. To be sure, once the Portuguese ex-Conversos organized in Jewish communities, their leaders made efforts to reconnect with the wider Sephardi world, and these efforts had serious symbolic and strategic value. But the Portuguese Jews' rootedness in the Converso experience meant that their core sense of collective self remained distinct. Contributing factors to their enduring sense of distinctness were these aspects of Converso experience: the absorption of Catholic notions of piety; the "de-rabbinization" of crypto-Jewish belief; and the difficulty for many Conversos of maintaining any stable set of traditional beliefs. The outward image their leaders sought to cultivate may have been one of Sephardi traditionalism, but, at an emotional level, members of these communities continued to regard themselves as members of the "nação"—a term that evoked the Converso past.
- Subjects
PORTUGAL; SEPHARDIM; PORTUGUESE Jews; MARRANOS; ETHNOLOGY; CATHOLICS; JEWISH identity; JEWISH history -- 70-1789
- Publication
Jewish Social Studies, 2008, Vol 15, Issue 1, p66
- ISSN
0021-6704
- Publication type
Article