This paper consists of two parts. In the first, I am going to review and synthesise the history of Jews — or rather various versions of Fuzzy Jews1— who settled in Brazil during the time it was a Portuguese colony, including a brief period when part of the nation passed under Dutch control. This overview probably adds nothing new to the history of this topic, except insofar as it stresses the details necessary to develop the argument in the next section. The second part turns to a more difficult and in many ways speculative kind of history, that of the emotional and psychological experience of being a Jew — again in several versions of nominal Catholicism. Here is where I bring to bear insights from psychohistory and the history of mentalities in order to interrogate the sources in Inquisitional archives and archaeological studies in Brazil and elsewhere in South America.
Though often noted that Crusaders slaughtered Jews en route to the Holy Land, it is not appreciated that the Jewish response turned a passive acceptance of martyrdom into active 'Sanctification of the Name' in which parents killed their children. Modelled on the Binding of Isaac and the cult of temple sacrifices, it sought to parody the crucified saviour of the Christians; it also reversed traditional rabbinical ethics, putting bloody self sacrifice at the heart of a new theology. This temporary transformation of Judaism changed the way in which Jews identified themselves in Christian Europe. The massacres were not minor digressions during the Crusades but key events.
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