Segundo as judias costumavam fazer: as Dias-Fernandes e o criptojudaismo feminino no Pernambuco do século XVI

Abstract

This paper analyzes the role of the women of the family Dias-Fernandes, who leaded by the matriarch Branca Dias, contributed to the preservation of a clandestine Judaism (Crypto-Judaism) in the province of Pernambuco during the sixteenth century. Regarding then, the social, political, economic and cultural settings which contributed to the formation of new subjects in the Portuguese overseas empire, among them, the New Christians who were the result of forced baptisms of Jews to Roman Catholicism, by a Royal decree in Portugal in the year 1497. With the birth of the New Christians, new forms of practices of a secret Judaism began to be arranged and started to be performed "indoors". Therefore, emerges in Portugal, and later in the Portuguese America, a female leadership of Crypto-Jewish services, since the women were primarily related to domestic religiosity. With this situation, the Church seeks to suppress the Jewish heresy, relying on the action of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, on courts in the Kingdom and on Visitations in the Colony of Brazil. From the inquisitorial persecution towards the Judaizing New Christians arises a documentation ensemble which will provides a construction about the Judaizers practices and the resistance made by the women of Jewish descent in the province of Pernambuco.