Estudio socioliterario de escritores sefardíes de procedencia portuguesaSamuel Usque, Bento Teixeira, Ambrosio Fernandes Brandão y nuevos escritores del nordeste brasileño

Abstract

This investigation aims to exhibit the literary situation of the Sephardic community starting from the expulsion edicts of 1492 and 1497 in Spain and Portugal, and contextualizing it along with historical and socio-cultural peculiarities of the new Christian community, who settled in the North of Brazil, especially in the Nordeste Region. Our starting point will be the work by Samuel Usque, the author that perfectly marks the passage between the European and Brazilian dimensions, and becomes a point of reference thanks to the style he used and the themes presented, that belong to the Classical tradition on it's Renaissance reelaboration. Following the same line, albeit later, we have Bento Teixeira and Ambrosio Fernandes Brandão, who are, along with Usque, the three leading authorities in the portuguese language in relation to this work: the fact that we can consider the possibility of the Sepharadic literature, originating from Europe, propelled through the Transatlantic territories. Finally, we conclude our investigation with the continuity of the tradition with a new and modern expression of Sephardic literature, in Pernambuco, thanks to the creative effort of a nordestino contemporary group of writers, characterized by their link with their Semitic past. At the head of this group is the person that is considered its main exponent, the poet Odmar Braga. This doctoral thesis is based on three main lines of investigation: The contextualization of the group of writers on the geopolitical, socio-economic and literary map of the era. 17 The presentation of each writer and their work during the colonial era, framed in the carrying axis: the belonging to the Jewish faith -being it hidden, as in the case of the crypto-Jews Bento Teixiera and Ambrosio Fernades Brandão; or openly practiced by Samuel Usque- that, along with the Classical and Renaissance traditions, establish a Western literary canon, that doesn't fit the concept of the National literature, rather than the group belonging to a identity concept of religion as their homeland, unlinked to the concept of physical borders. The on location search for the fruits, planted during the time between the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries: a generation of a nordestino group of writers, whose creation was inspired by crucial Sephardic epics, and who bridge the gap between tradition and the present day This thesis doesn't aim to develop a theory, but rather create a reflection using the data collected during these years of study, starting from the hypothesis that there is a sole thought present in each writer, each with the differences that clearly exist between them because, setting aside their personal and peculiar ways of expressing it, they share similar aspects and participate in a dialogue that crosses the boundries between the Humanity disciplines, which we will use as a theoretical base for our analysis (recalling among them: Cultural Studies, Philology, Literary Criticism, Sociology, Economics, History, etc.), that form an interzone, that are used as a meeting point and try to give explanations and think about the role of the Humanities linked to the differences, the inequalities and injustices, the relation between power and dominion when observing he possible methods of survival -in the specific case of the Sephardi, thanks to texts and the belonging to an oppressed group- of a minority community with regards to the ruling powers. 18 Throughout these pages, we contextualize the circumstances of the Portuguese situation under the rule Manoel I and Carlos V; those of the territorial division of captaincies in Brazil and their engenhos regimes, paying particular attention to the Pernambuco. After clearing-up these points, we move on to the structure of the education and Humanities, lead by the Jesuit missions; all of this is directed at elucidating how the knowledge was present in the Portuguese colony, and how the literary heritage arrived from Europe thanks to maritime trading and an influx of migration. In the literary part of this thesis, we will discuss not so well known writers and works from Brazil and Portugal, untouched by critics, having not been considered a unitary subject included in the discourse that contains all of them under sign of the Sephardi; in such a way that it heads towards the creation of a new tradition that - passing through the silent centuries (a silence due to another diaspora into the Sertão and the lands of North America)- has ended in the new memory generation between poetry and prose.