Entre a cruz e a estrela de Davi: problematizando as identidades judaicas no Brasil imperial.

Abstract

The marks left by and on the Jews configure the landscape of our research that is what avoids them to be forgotten as a reference mark in the process of the Brazilian nation identity construction. Such marks had contributed for fragmented and distinct identities formations, reassuring to compose a plural Brazil aquarelle among narratives of interests by monarchs, clerical, imperialists and other groups. In our research, we have problematized about the Jews that had immigrate into Brazil lived and understood the XIX century, specifically in Rio de Janeiro, that was the capital and administrative and political most important unit of Brazil, and in Amazonia, where the major number of Jewish immigrant people has settled down at that time. Throughout this path, we have thought about them over the narrated representations in printed codices at that time, and over political speeches, ecclesial letters, commerce and company registers, nationalization letters, graves and laws that attributed meaning and changed the Jews lives. So, we have observed that not only the new Jewish identities were created, but also the new values were given to the imperial society. Because of it, in chapter I we notify a general view of new Christians and Marrans in colony age, firstly concerning the Portuguese laws about the practices that evolve Jews through the Portuguese monarchies reflecting how these laws reached Brazil as a colony, and how they helped the immigration. In chapter II, we have built a question about the social and cultural life of Jews in the Imperial Capital through adapting and changing of their political and economical partings. In chapter III, we have reflected about the production of a new constitution for the Jews that had immigrated to the North of Brazil, moved by the search of fortune and happiness, drawing the process of formation construction of the first Jewish organized communities in Brazil. We have searched to problematize the Jews constitution since sharing – or not – cultures, among interference in traditions, language differences, and application of society standards and multiple cultural practices in a territory where their citizenship will be negotiated in a constant transformation of meaning webs that give feelings to the subjects that composed a more and more plural country.