Mission Blue

Mission Blue

Sylvia Earle - Proteger os oceanos

"Uriel da Costa

 had been baptized Gabriel, born in Oporto, Portugal. His father was a devout Catholic, but his mother came from a converso family and, as the work of recent historians has unearthed, most likely observed some of the secret rites of Marranism. Gabriel studied canon law at the University of Coimbra and was a church treasurer. Da Costa described himself as having become disillusioned with Christianity. In studying and comparing the New Testament with the Five Books of Moses, he found contradictions and reached the conclusion that Judaism, from which Christianity had sprung, presented the authentic experience, with Christianity a corruption of it. He also confessed that Christianity’s emphasis on hell’s damnation terrified him. Soon both he and his five brothers were inwardly identifying themselves as Jewish. After the death of their Catholic father, the six boys, together with their mother, Banca, determined to leave Portugal.

He presents himself as having voluntarily left Portugal for the freedom to practice Judaism openly, but the historian Israel Révah, researching the records of the Oporto Inquisition, found that, unsurprisingly, the converso had attracted the attention of the office of the Inquisition, which was preparing a devastating case against him, so his emigration was most likely not simply a spiritual journey but an attempt to escape with his life.

Once in Amsterdam, da Costa found that the Judaism being practiced there did not live up to his expectations. The departures from the pristine ancient religion of Moses were, in his eyes, unjustifiable extensions of God’s direct revelations. The accretions of rabbinical ordinances and Talmudic rulings, the codification of the so-called Oral Law, offended da Costa’s construction of what Judaism ought to be. The organized hierarchical religion of the rabbis was as much a corruption of the original Mosaic Code as was Catholicism, and da Costa set about single-handedly to reform it, to purify it of all its post-Mosaic content. As the historian Yirmiyahu Yovel points out, we must read Examplar with several grains of salt. It is highly dubious that da Costa believed that “the religion of Moses had been petrified for over two millennia, waiting for Uriel da Costa to perform an unhistorical leap into it. However vaguely and unwillingly, da Costa was aware that post-biblical Judaism was different from the original model. But he hoped and believed that the fluid New Jewish situation offered a historical opportunity to remedy this. … Da Costa expected that (unlike the Catholicism of which he had despaired) Judaism could lend itself to a purifying reform in the original direction of the Bible, especially within the New Jewish communities where, out of a minimal and shattered basis, former Marranos were trying to reconstruct a Jewish life for themselves. Since these New Jews were already engaged in an effort to recapture their lost essence, they may as well have regressed further back to their origins and restored the purer biblical Judaism that elsewhere had been obliterated.”

Needless to say, his efforts did not find favor with the rabbis of Amsterdam, who were charged with the task of transporting the former Marranos back to the halakhic Judaism from which history had separated them.

Da Costa reacted with fury to the intransigence of the religious authorities of the community, and in search of a more authentic Judaism left Amsterdam for the Sephardic community of Hamburg, which did not respond any more favorably to his reforming ideas than Amsterdam had. In 1616 he composed a set of eleven theses attacking what he called “the vanity and invalidity of the traditions and ordinances of the Pharisees.” He claimed that the rabbis, in equating Talmudic interpretations with the Torah, “make the word of man equal to that of God.”

On August 14, 1618, da Costa was put in kherem by the chief rabbi of Venice, Rabbi Leon de Medina, who was the teacher of the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Rabbi Morteira. He was also put under a ban in Hamburg, and returned to Amsterdam, still fighting. He committed his protest to writing, publishing in 1624 his feisty Exame das tradições phariseas (Examination of the Pharisaic Traditions), which objects to such laws as male circumcision, the laying on of tefillin, or phylacteries, and also vehemently protests the extrabiblical inclusion of the doctrine of immortality and divine retribution. This doctrine, he confesses, was precisely what had driven him from Catholicism. “In truth, the most distressful and wretched time in my life was when I believed that eternal bliss or misery awaited man and that according to his works he would earn that bliss or that misery.” He was terrified by the eschatological metaphysics and found peace only when he realized the absurdity of the claim that the soul might survive the death of the body, since the soul is only an aspect of the body, the vital source that animates it and also accounts for rationality.

(...)

But the community was under rabbinical orders to regard the religious renegade as a pariah. Da Costa writes in the Examplar that even children mocked him on the streets and threw stones at his windows. Nevertheless, da Costa did not absent himself from the community. Of course, he was already under kherem in Venice and Hamburg, and he must have reasoned that wherever he went Jewish communities would find him intolerable. But interestingly, even though he had reached the intellectual conclusion that Judaism, like Christianity, was but a man-made system arising out of man’s needs, and that the true religion was deism—the belief, based solely on reason and not revelation, in a God who created the universe and then left it to its own devices, assuming no control over life and never intervening in the course of history or of natural phenomena—still, on an emotional level, da Costa seemed incapable of taking leave of Judaism, or at least of the Jewish community. He lived among the Amsterdam Sephardim as a despised individual, clinging to the margins of a world that had become for him an open narcissistic wound. Yet he did not simply pick himself up and quit Jewish life decisively. Though the Jews had excommunicated him he was not prepared to excommunicate the Jews. His disinclination to think of himself as outside the religious community is telling and casts a dramatic contrast with Spinoza. "

   Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza:The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, p.133-137.   

The obsession with the questions of who is a Jew

In the 1630s there were again a rash of accusations in Portugal that the conversos were crypto-Judaizers, and that they were trying to convert Old Christians, particularly their Christian servants. The inquisitor of Llerena wrote in 1628 or soon thereafter, “From the moment of its conception, every fetus permanently carries with it the moral attributes—in the case of the Marranos, the moral depravity—of its parents.” This was not a new idea in Portugal. The sermons preached on the occasion of autos-da-fé throughout the fifteenth century often stressed the immutability of the Jews, a moral trait passed on from generation to generation.

The former conversos who came to Amsterdam brought with them the interwoven preoccupations with Jewish identity and personal identity that the Inquisition had forced on them. While the rash of accusations were going on in Portugal, conversos kept arriving, leaving relatives and friends behind.

In the relative freedom of Protestant Amsterdam, the former Marranos set about organizing themselves into the kind of community required for the full performance of the halakha from which they had been severed. At first, rabbis had to be imported to instruct them, though they soon started producing their own; a model school was organized; an elaborate hierarchical system was erected for guidance as well as for chastisement. 

But the old painful dilemmas would not so easily be laid to rest; how could they possibly be when the trauma had gone so deep and those who walked the streets of the Vlooienburg and the Breestraat had New Christian friends and relatives in Portugal still kept under the ever watchful eye of the Inquisition? The Jews of Amsterdam—especially those whose unorthodoxy brought them into conflict with the rabbis— were themselves still objects of pointed interest to the Church, and inquisitorial spies walked among the Dutch Sephardim. 

In fact, we owe what scant knowledge we have of Spinoza himself during the period that had been known as his “lost years”—the four years between his excommunication and his known fraternization with various dissenting Christians, known collectively as the Collegiants—to investigative diggings in the records of the Inquisition by the historian Israel Révah. Révah discovered reports on the young Spinoza from two different sources. One was a Latin-American Augustinian monk, Friar Tomás Solanao y Robles, who had visited Amsterdam in late 1658 and voluntarily reported to the Madrid Inquisition upon his return. He volunteered the information to clear himself of any suspicion he may have attracted by traveling in non-Catholic lands. And then on the following day, a report was filed, this time upon request, by a Spanish soldier, Captain Miguel Pérez de Maltranilla3 Spinoza’s surfacing to light from out of the medieval murk of the inquisitorial files of the Church—which still, apparently, considered his soul of their concern, since he was the offspring of conversos, and so, in its eyes, still Christian— underscores the anachronistic audacity of Spinoza’s choice: to define his life on his terms, not as a heterodox Jew or Christian. But it underscores, as well, how vividly present the powerful and hidden forces of the Inquisition remained in the lives of the community—even in the life of the banished of the community, in a heretic Jew like Spinoza. 

The obsession with the questions of who is a Jew, what is a Jew, can a person be un-Judaized, re-Judaized—all of these questions intertwined with the Marrano preoccupation with redemptive possibilities—would have been, one imagines, like an incessant nervous murmur registering just below audibility, a constant discordant accompaniment to conversations in homes and streets and synagogues, as well as in the inner recesses of unquiet minds. Sometimes the murmur would break out into painfully articulated communal conflicts and contretemps, ripping apart whatever façade of placid Dutch burghers they might have been trying to assume."

   Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza:The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, p.130-133.   

Plano do Inferno

Se não houver fruto, a árvore será esquecida.

"A ficção e a não-ficção não podem dividir-se assim tão facilmente. A ficção talvez não seja real, mas é verdadeira; vai além da colectânea de factos para chegar a verdades emocionais e psicológicas. Quanto à não ficção, à história, pode ser real, mas a sua verdade é escorregadia, de difícil acesso, sem um significado indelevelmente associado. Se a história não se transformar em estória, morre para todos excepto para o historiador. A arte é a mala da história, na qual se transporta o que é essencial. A arte é a bóia de salvação da história. A arte é semente, a arte é memória, a arte é vacina. - Pressentindo que o historiador se preparava para o interromper, Henry apressou-se a prosseguir incoerentemente: - Com o Holocausto, temos uma árvore com enormes raízes históricas e apenas alguns escassos e minúsculos frutos ficcionais. mas é no fruto que está a semente! É o fruto que as pessoas escolhem. Se não houver fruto, a árvore será esquecida. Cada um de nós é como um flip book - continuou Henry, embora não houvesse uma progressão lógica entre essa ideia e o que acabara de dizer. Cada um de nós é uma mistura de facto e ficção, um tecido feito de histórias que vive no nosso corpo real. Não é assim?"

                          Yann Martel, Beatriz e Virgílio, Editorial Presença, 2010, pp.17-18.                          

Bill Evans - Alone (Again)

Last Supper

Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz - A doctor´s Eyewitness Account, Arcade, pp.177-178.

"A Jew is a Jew is a Jew.

  The Marranos were enmeshed in some of the same identity-metaphysics as were their persecutors. For them, too, there was an inviolable fact of the matter concerning true Jewish identity that remained untouched by all outer performance. They may have gone through formal Christian conversions, taken the sacrament, and gone every week to confession, but within the confessional of their inner being they, too, continued to insist on their essential Jewishness.

A Sephardic friend tells me his grandfather used to tell him a joke that perhaps goes back to Marrano times. A Jew has undergone a conversion process, in the course of which the priest has put his hands on the Jew’s head and repeated several times, “You were a Jew, now you’re Christian, you were a Jew, now you’re Christian.” A few weeks pass and the priest comes on a Friday to see how his converso is getting on. The priest finds, to his shock and dismay, that the New Christian is not eating fish for his Friday night dinner, as he ought to as a good Catholic, but rather a roasted chicken. The Jew, ordered to account for himself, explains that he had simply put his hand on the chicken’s head and repeated several times, “You were a chicken, now you’re fish, you were a chicken, now you’re fish.

Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza:The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, p.127.

Meeting John Berger (D: Jos de Putter)

Pentti Sammallahti

Por sugestão de John Berger, Why Look at Animals?, (Penguin books, 2009, p.8-9) onde se pode ler:

"Early this morning, when I was still in bed, a swallow flew in, circled the room, saw its error and flew out through the window past the plum trees to alight on the telephone wire. I relate this small incident because it seems to me to have something to do with Pentti Sammallahti's photographs. They too, like the swallow, are aberrant.

I have some of his photographs in the house now for two years. I often take them out of their folder to show to friends who pass. They usually gasp at first, and them peer closer, smiling. They look at the places shown for a longer than usual with a photograph. Perhaps they ask whether I know the photographer, Pentti Sammallahti, personally? Or they ask what part of Russia were they taken in? In what year? They never try to put their evident pleasure into words, for is a secret one. They simply look closer and remember. What?"

John Coltrane - Coltrane Plays The Blues

Dante, A Divina Comédia, inferno I:55-57

E qual è quei che voluntieri acquista,
  e giugne 'l tempo che perder lo face,
  che 'ntittu suoi pensier piange e s'attrista;

                             ...

E como quem os ganhos que conquista,
  chegado o tempo que a perder o abala
  em seu pensar só chora e se contrista.

                       (tradução de Vasco Graça Moura)

                            ...

We all so willingly record our gains,

   until the hour that leads us into loss.

   Then every single thought is tears and sadness.

                       (tradução de Robin Kirkpatrick)