FILM LOOKS AT BRAZIL'S HIDDEN JEWS

Documentary looks at Brazilians rediscovering their Jewish roots By: Michael Kepp

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 25 (JTA) — A new Brazilian documentary film tells the story of Catholics in the country’s northeast who practice some Jewish traditions — whether or not they know it. Those customs were handed down to them by their ancestors, Portuguese Jews who were forced by a 1497 royal edict, and the Inquisition that followed, to convert to Catholicism, and who later fled the land of their birth.

The film is “The Star Hidden in the Backlands,” and the star in question is the Star of David. The first group of Portuguese Jews arrived in Brazil around 1500, with the first wave of colonizers, but even in the New World they had to keep their ancestry secret. The Inquisition, which lasted for 300 years, followed them to Brazil: Many secret Jews were sent back to Lisbon for trial. Elaine Eiger, a Jewish photographer, and Luize Valente, a journalist, are the film’s co-directors. The two interviewed the descendants of these “New Christians,” mostly in small towns in Brazil’s three northeastern states.

Some of the people they interviewed know about their Jewish roots and some do not; some have returned to Judaism and others have not. All of them talk about the customs and rituals that link them to the first Jews who came to Brazil. Death-related rituals are the most widespread. They include washing a dead body and cutting the nails; wrapping it in a white linen shroud and burying it without a casket; discarding water left in jugs and washbowls during the preburial mourning period; and putting stones on graves. Other customs include not eating pork, circumcising baby boys, praying during the first day of a new moon, and sweeping house dust out the back door instead of the front — an act thought to bring bad luck.

Some of the New Christians’ descendants perform the rituals and customs of their Jewish ancestors, but don’t know that those ancestors weren’t Catholic.