History

In the 1530’s, Portugal’s King João III divided Brazil into 16 commercial territories called captaincies. The captaincy of Pernambuco was given to Duarte Coelho, friend to many New Christians—as descendents of converted Jews were known. Pernambuco was the most profitable of the captaincies and the mainstay of the economy was sugar, with New Christians running about half the colony’s sugar mills. Planters typically kept a manor house on their plantations and a town house in Olinda (four miles north of modern Recife), which was the capital under the Portuguese.

More than half the New Christians in sixteenth-century Pernambuco were secret Jews, supporting at least 10 clandestine synagogues. Small groups met in private homes for Shabbat, while larger groups gathered in secret chapels on the sugar plantations—farther from the eyes of neighbors—on major festivals. The Inquisition came to northeastern Brazil in 1591 and many of the colony’s secret Jews were sent to Lisbon for trial.

In 1630 the Dutch captured Pernambuco and transferred the capital to Recife, which had a better port. In addition to the Jews who came as immigrants, crypto-Jews already in the colony came into the open. In 1641, the first synagogue building in the Americas—Kahal Zur Israel—was constructed on the Rua dos Judeus (Street of the Jews). Despite anti-Jewish agitation from Dutch Calvinists and Portuguese Catholics, the ruler of Dutch Recife, Count Maurice of Nassau, saw to it that Jewish rights were upheld. Under Dutch rule, Jews came to number about 1,400—half the colony’s free population. Most were involved with sugar as planters, brokers, exporters or financiers. The first rabbi in the New World, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, arrived in 1641 from Amsterdam.

When the Netherlands ceded Pernambuco back to Portugal in 1654, Jews—fearful of a newly imposed Inquisition—left. Most went back to Holland or to the Caribbean, where they planted the seeds of a new sugar industry. One group of 23 was captured by Spanish pirates. Eventually rescued in Jamaica, they were put on a French ship headed for the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. It was this group that formed the nucleus of what would become the largest Jewish community in history. New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel is a direct descendent of Kahal Zur Israel.

Some of Recife’s Jews did not leave with the Dutch but went back underground. The Inquisition rooted out secret Jews in Brazil’s northeast for another 200 years, by which time Jewish practice had supposedly died out. In recent years, however, many people of Jewish descent have emerged. Depending on whom one talks to and which definition is employed, Jewish descendents number anywhere from dozens to hundreds of thousands.

In the twentieth century a new Jewish community formed in Recife. It began in the 1920’s with immigrants from the shtetls of Russia and Bessarabia and continued in the 1930’s with a more urbanized immigration from Hungary, Romania, Germany and Austria. Beginning as peddlers and shopkeepers, they produced a small but vibrant Jewish culture that included not only organizational life but Yiddish theater and newspapers as well.

Community

Recife has two overlapping Jewish communities. The mainstream is primarily descended from the twentieth-century immigrants. Their communal center is the Centro Israelita, in the city’s Torre section, at Rua José de Hollanda 798. Among the institutions housed in the Centro are Renascer (“rebirth”), a liberal congregation that holds Friday-night services; the umbrella organization of the community, the Federação Israelita de Pernambuco and a Jewish school. For information on the community, call school director Marcel Kosminsky at 55-81-3227-0418.

Jews live primarily in the Torre, Casa Forte, Madalena and Graças neighborhoods and along Boa Viagem Beach. The children of the immigrants became doctors, engineers and architects; the grandchildren spread deeper into the professional sector. Though still a cohesive community of about 1,500, intermarriage stands at 70 percent.

The second community is that of the Anousim—descendents of crypto-Jews, many of whom now identify or practice openly as Jews. Their religious center is the synagogue essentially abandoned but still owned by the mainstream community and located at Rua Martins Junior 29, in a neighborhood that once had many Jewish residents and businesses. The synagogue has Saturday morning services and congregants often come back for an afternoon Torah lesson. (For information on services, call Isaac Essoudry at 3465-8827.)

Three years ago a rabbi from Belo Horizonte, 1,500 miles to the south, began making periodic trips to Recife to perform conversions. About 15 families of Anousim have formally joined the community based at the Centro Israelita. Others are either in the process of converting or believe conversion is unnecessary.

The encounter between the groups has been a combination of warm embrace and misunderstanding. Some look at the former Anousim and see an inspiring Jewish story; others welcome them but have no notion of their past or of the greater number of Anousim outside their view. Some of the Anousim—hardly united themselves—speak of rejection by the mainstream community.

Recife’s third congregation is the Chabad Center (3325-3733). Though there is no Lubavitch community per se, the center’s location in Boa Viagem, the neighborhood with the largest concentration of Jews, attracts many to its Shabbat services and its school.

Despite their small numbers, Recife’s Jews are the focus of the city’s attention these days. Locals view the Dutch period with pride and regard Nassau as a great builder from whom today’s politicians can learn. Until five years ago, the two islands that form the center of old Recife were run-down and dangerous. The restoration of the synagogue is part of the city’s renaissance. The synagogue restoration, the emergence of Anousim and recent research on the colonial period are putting the Jewish story into the center of a rich regional stew of culture and folklore that includes music (forró and frevo), tales of heroes and bandits, and Recife’s own brand of Carnaval.

The Jewish place in Brazil’s history and culture was barely known before the twentieth century. The Recife-born sociologist Gilberto Freyre, one of the first to treat Brazil’s multiracial character as a strength, was also the first to recognize the sizable Jewish element in Brazil’s population. (Recently two of Freyre’s grandchildren had DNA tests, which showed the probability of Jewish ancestry.) In 1996, José Antônio Gonçalves de Mello published the documentary history People of the Nation: New Christians and Jews in Pernambuco, 1542-1654. The Federal University of Pernambuco has a new program in Jewish studies; when the program’s director, Tânia Kaufman, published The Jewish Presence in Pernambuco last winter, it could immediately be seen in the windows of the city’s bookstores.

Sights

In the center of Old Recife is the Rua de Bom Jesus, nowadays also identified by its original name, Rua dos Judeus. Gentrification has turned the street into a cultural and entertainment hub, with constant traffic to and from the restaurants, sidewalk cafés and nightspots. The buildings are mostly colonial-era edifices painted green, yellow, blue and tan. In the middle of the street’s west side, at number 197/203, is the restored Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue, scheduled to be reinaugurated this month. The synagogue is a yellow stone, two-story building with arched ochre doors and windows and iron railings.

The synagogue now houses the Jewish Cultural Center of Pernambuco. Inside, the ground level reveals the original synagogue floor (at least a foot below the level of today’s floor) and the mikve, discovered by archaeologists before the restoration work began. In addition to what is visible below the floor, the ground level will be largely devoted to the cultural center’s exhibits.

As in the Dutch period, when the ground level consisted of shops, the rebuilt sanctuary will be on the second floor. The center will also have a historic archive and research center. For information on the center and its programs, call Marcel Kosminsky or e-mail Tânia Kaufman at tnkaufman@aol.com.

Up the street from Kahal Zur Israel is the Malakoff Tower, a cultural center and observatory. The tower is said to be built from stones taken from the arched entries that stood at each end of the Rua dos Judeus.

Across the bridges on the neighboring island of Antonio Vaz are several spots of Jewish interest. Among the most beautiful historic buildings are the Governor’s House, the Palace of Justice and the Santa Isabel Theater, all of which surround the Praça da Republica. All stand on land once occupied by Vrijburg Palace, a residence and seat of government built mainly by Jewish architects and engineers for Count Maurice of Nassau.

Recife is as proud of its bridges as it is of its beaches, and two of the spans linking Antonio Vaz island with the mainland have Jewish connections. The Duarte Coelho Bridge is named for the man who brought so many New Christians to Pernambuco in the sixteenth century. Two short blocks away is the blue-and-gold Boa Vista Bridge, the oldest span in Brazil, built in the 1640’s by the Jewish engineer Baltasar da Fonseca—according to legend, after his father drowned while crossing the river. This bridge connects the Rua Nova, a bustling semipedestrian mall that had many Jewish residents during the Dutch period, and Rua Imperatriz, which had Jewish residents in the colonial era and again in the twentieth century.

Most of Recife’s neighborhoods and many surrounding suburbs take their names from the sugar mills that once dotted the landscape. The oldest standing plantation house is at Camaragibe, about 20 minutes from the city center. Camaragibe was owned by Diogo Fernandes and Branca Dias, who had a clandestine synagogue in their home that was used on major Jewish holidays.

The plantation’s manor house still stands, although it is difficult to tell what, beyond the foundation, is from the sixteenth century. The charming pink house is surrounded by dense vegetation that protects it from the town that now bears its name. Though it is a private home, visitors routinely walk the grounds, and those who state a good reason may be admitted inside.

The house features dark wooden floors and a dining room table that seats at least 20. The current owners are Catholics, but the ground-floor family chapel is in all likelihood either the same room or on top of a basement chapel that was once the secret Jewish sanctuary.

The chapel itself has painted blue tiles on one wall bearing a likeness of its patron saint, Santiago. A seam on the stone floor under the carpet is suggestive of a long-sealed trap door, but an employee who escorts visitors says the basement has been closed for years. Adjacent to the chapel is a hallway door which he says once led to a stairway but is now a closet. Across from the closet is the library, in which a visitor’s eye falls easily on a shelf of Jewish books, including the Portuguese Antologia Judaica and a copy of The World of Sholem Aleichem in English. In the absence of more research, the imagination works overtime.

Ten minutes north of Recife is Olinda—the capital of Pernambuco during the first Portuguese period—which still has its sixteenth-century layout and charm. The city, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, has cobblestone streets lined with pastel-colored buildings. The center of Olinda is perched on a hill, which affords magnificent views of the fig and palm trees that surround the tile rooftops, and of the ocean and Recife in the distance.

The main street of Olinda is Rua Bispo Coutinho, and its most prominent landmark is the Igreja da Miseracórdia, which is likely where the Inquisition was seated in the 1590’s. Just up the street from the church, at No. 526, is a white house with yellow trim that is believed to occupy the site of Diogo Fernandes and Branca Dias’s town house. In addition to its clandestine synagogue, the house was also where Dias conducted the first school in Brazil, in which she taught sewing, embroidery and cooking to young girls.

Just down the street, at the top of an incline called Ladeira da Misericórdia (Hillside of Pity) stands a white and green building that houses Academia Santa Gertrude, a Catholic girls’ school. In the sixteenth century the site was occupied by several houses of Jews who were denounced to the Inquisition.

Personalities

The outstanding Jewish figure in Pernambuco’s history is Branca Dias, who spent 15 months in an Inquisition prison in her native Portugal and was denounced again after her death. In addition to the factual Dias, there are two legendary heroines of the same name, likely based on the historic Dias. According to Paulo Valadares, a leading Jewish genealogist, among the real Branca Dias’s many descendents today are Ciro Gomes, a potential presidential contender in 2002, and Chico Buarque da Holanda, one of the leading composers of Brazilian popular music.

The earliest Brazilian literature was written by Jews in Olinda. Bento Texeira Pinto wrote Prosopopéa, the first collection of poems, and Ambrósio Brandão authored the first history of the land. Four hundred years later, Recife produced Clarisse Lispector, one of contemporary Brazil’s most popular novelists. Another twentieth-century figure is Dr. Noel Nutels, known for his work with the Indians of northern Brazil.

Recommendations

Though the city’s main cultural attractions are in the center.

Unless you speak Portuguese, it’s best to travel with a guide. Aside from getting you to the sights, a local will help you distinguish between the city’s fantastic past and present, and its even more fantastic exaggerations.