Introduction

This introductory chapter lays out the groundwork for a discussion into the Portuguese Marrano movement and places this movement within the context of belonging and identification. It looks at the ways that cultural logics of kinship inform imaginings of self in relation to others, individually and collectively, both back in time and across vast distances, and the ways those same logics work in practice to render some people strangers and others, kin. The story of the Portuguese Marrano, in the end, is study of global interconnection, not only to the degree that the infrastructure and cultural flows of globalization enable the kinds of imaginings and interactions explored in the succeeding chapters, but equally in subjective perceptions of being connected to others, both far back in time and widely around the globe.

“My Lost Brothers and Sisters!”

This chapter focuses on the desires and conceptual frameworks that led the urban Marranos and foreign Jews to each other and through which they made sense of each other's presence and actions. Most forms of direct tourist–toured interaction studied by anthropologists occur within highly mediated contexts that emphasize difference. Among Marranos and their foreign visitors, on the other hand, there was a shared assumption of fundamental commonality, communicative transparency, and goodwill that resulted in surprisingly informal exchanges. However, beneath the appearance of mutual understanding and even emotional intimacy, culturally distinct structures of reasoning led to continual partial misunderstanding, or communicative slippage, both in the moment of encounter and after. And yet far from causing discord, it was precisely that slippage that enabled their interactions to work smoothly.

Outsider, In-Between

This chapter explores the transformations that occurred once the urban Marranos attempted to enter the world of Portugal's organized Jewish communities, which rejected them as non-Jews, and when they subsequently discovered other “outsiders” like themselves. It provides an ethnographic portrait of the processes through which they became Marranos, the existing social category that seemed closest to who they felt they were, and of the distinctive practices and dispositions through which that new facet of the self was constituted and expressed. Particular attention is given to how they learned to recognize and narrate the ways in which they were ancestrally or otherwise essentially Jewish, in dialogue with foreign visitors.

Hidden Within, Imported from Without

This chapter pursues two interrelated aims. The first is to track the complex social category of being Jewish in Portugal across centuries, teasing apart its various meanings and subcategories over time. For to be “Jewish” in Portugal is no straightforward matter: while the social category “Jews” (judeus) has existed in Portuguese society for well over a millennium, its meaning has varied continuously over the past five hundred years. In addition, the chapter aims to provide the broad historical context—as recorded by historians and as remembered by diverse stakeholders in the present—for the emergence and rapid growth of urban Marrano associations in the late 1990s and 2000s.

From Ancestors to Affection

This chapter explains that the urban Marranos were effectively consigned to waiting for the right visitors to appear, people who would see them simultaneously as B'nai Anusim—descendants of the forced converts—and as historically situated individuals living very much in the Portuguese present. It shows that the few visitors who were able to hold those two aspects of their condition in tension realized that their primary need, more than an appropriate ritual of reincorporation, was a concrete program of face-to-face instruction, guidance, and community building before they could live as fully fledged Jews. Ultimately, what proved most important was for them to forge lasting bonds with visitors who would incorporate them into the global “Jewish family” through personal relations of love and care.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter summarizes the major themes of this volume and the developments which occurred among the people who were studied and interviewed for this book. It shows how their story offers poignant material for exploring how people come to identify with far-flung others; how they seek and find glimmerings of mystical connection in a world said to be disenchanted; how the horizons of kinship expand in a globally interconnected era; and how relatedness emerges and gathers strength as a lived condition over time. Tracing transformations in Marrano imaginings of self in relation to others has also helped us grasp the profound role of affect in shaping identity and sociality across domains and scales—from personal encounters to the imagined community and back again.

Essentially Jewish

This chapter focuses on identity as well as identification—an active, often emotionally charged process of seeing oneself as a particular kind of person and intentionally cultivating the qualities and practices proper to it. It examines the variety and contingency of urban Marranos' modes of self-identification as Jews and teases apart the Portuguese cultural logics of race, nation, descent, and the self that make their articulation of a Jewish self coherent, both to themselves and to others. As this chapter shows, identification, a core component of self-making, is a dialogical process: it is through our interactions with others, whether face-to-face or imagined, that we become self-aware and develop, reflect upon, and refine our sense of ourselves.