Tradition is not something a man can learn; not a thread he can pick up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.
--LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
It is the natural condition of exile, putting down roots in memory.
--SALMAN RUSHDIE
Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
--ITALO CALVINO
To everyone but themselves, it would seem, the Portuguese Jews of seventeenth century Amsterdam were a living contradiction--or alternatively, representing trends of which they were naturally unaware, and which they might not have favoured. Those two perspectives, no doubt, underlie the 'strangeness' experienced by historians of an earlier generation in approaching the Portuguese Jews of the early modern era.
The most blatant contradiction--reiterated more frequently than any other--was summarized most famously in Gebhardt's pithy phrase: 'The Marrano is a Catholic without faith and a Jew without knowledge, but a Jew by will.'
Swetschinski, Daniel M. Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam. London - Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000, p. 315.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário