Contemporary Oral Religiosity versus the Crypto-Jewish Prayerbook of Braganza (1925)

With the three centuries of Inquisitorial persecutions in Portugal (1536-1821), the Jews were forced to convert (becoming new-Christians), to flee the country or to hide their religion, in order to remain in their homeland. For fear of the ongoing anti-Semitism, which persisted long after the end of the Holy Office´s activity, several crypto-Jewish families continued to develop their own strategies in order to remain loyal to their inherited mosaic faith, particularly in the Northeast region of Portugal. The Inquisition had destroyed almost all cultural and religious material traces of the Portuguese Jews, including their sacred books, which were declared forbidden. Therefore, the oral transmission of prayers and religious rituals became common among these crypto-Jews, until the present. This paper analyses the vernacular syncretic religiosity still in practice, comparing it with the scarce written sources of such religiosity, among the neo-crypto-Jews particularly in Braganza. These are persons who are neither Jew nor Christian but live on the margins of both cultural and religious traditions, negotiating the conflicting terrain of memory and denial. Such identity construction is anchored on the (re)creation of narratives – derived from shared memory, from a relation to a past of persecutions and from oral history -, to recall their ancestors´ religiosity. In this study, Crypto-Jewish oral prayers and prayerbooks are analyzed, using Mauss´ sociality of prayers and also their individual aspects, as they reveal the hopes and desires not merely of individuals but of larger communities.