Language:
Portuguese
Year of publication:
2005
Titel der Quelle:
Revista de Estudos Judaicos
Angaben zur Quelle:
6 (2005-2006) 123-129
Keywords:
Crypto-Jews
;
Antisemitism History 1800-2000
;
Blood accusation
Abstract:
In Beira, a Portuguese province inhabited by many descendants of Conversos, a legend circulated in the late 19th century among the Christian villagers that the descendants of the Conversos practiced a kind of euthanasia ritual, which consisted of accelerating the death of a suffering person by suffocating him. The ritual was said to be carried out by a specialist called an "abafador". The first record of this legend appeared in Lisbon, in the "Revista Lusitana", Vol. 2 (1902), in an article by João de Castro Lopo, who wrote an explanatory note on the word "abafador", a term Lopo heard in the town of Santa Margarida, and that he supposed was in current use in the Beira-Baixa county. The term is also found in works by the ethnographers José Leite de Vasconcellos (1858-1941), in his "Etnografia portuguesa" (Lisbon, 1933), and in Casimiro de Moraes Machado's "Subsídios para a história de Mogadouro: Os marranos de Vilarinhos dos Galegos: Tentativa etnográfica" (1898), as well as in the fictional work of the doctor and writer Miguel Torga (1907-1995), "Novos contos da montanha" (Coimbra, 1944).
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