Grants Awarded for Dissertations on Jewish Studies Topics, 2007-08

Yair Saguey, Florida International University
Bnei Anusim in Brazil

Yair Saguey’s research concerns the communities of Bnei Anusim that have emerged in northeast Brazil since the 1970s. These communities claim to be descendants of Crypto-Jews, who kept their Jewish religious practice secret in colonial Brazil for hundreds of years after the forced conversion of Portuguese Jews in 1497. Saguey proposes to examine the links between these contemporary communities and the Crypto-Jews and identify the historical circumstances that led to the re-emergence of Jewish identity.

After 1497, a great many forcibly converted Jews (“New Christians”) emigrated to Brazil, where large numbers continued to practice Judaism, even in the face of pressure from the Inquisition. The recorded history of the Brazilian Crypto-Jews ends in 1773, when the Portuguese crown ended all distinctions between old and New Christians and Inquisatorial persecution stopped. By conducting field work in northeast Brazil, Saguey will attempt to gather family histories that establish that Crypto-Judaism continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, only to come into the open in recent decades. His hypothesis is that the emergence of these openly Jewish communities is a result of Brazil’s return to democracy in the 1980s and of the declining influence of the country’s Catholic Church.

Saguey, who was born in Israel, graduated from Tel Aviv University in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in History and Interdisciplinary Studies. After studying at the Latin American Institute in Tel Aviv, he enrolled in the doctoral program in Atlantic History at Florida International University.