Epigraphie et Soteriologie

Visiting Bordeaux in the early 18th century, Dom Edmond Martène and Dom Ursin Durand report that the Cordeliers have the sole right to bury the Jews, of which there are about a hundred families in Bourdeaux, where they have no synagogue or brand who distinguishes them. They put on the graves of their dead epitaphs, in which they count the years since the creation of the world. Established in Bordeaux following Letters Patent granted by Henry II in 1550, New Christians or Portuguese merchants were from converted Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. Concealing their identity and their Jewish observances, they buried their dead for two centuries in lands dependent on various monasteries. In 1728, the Portuguese Jewish Nation acquired a particular cemetery (nowadays located at 105 cours de la Marne) - an 18th century religious space practically unchanged in the 21st century. This volume analyzes and synthesizes the discourse engraved on 255 burials with counterpart landscapes of the Portuguese diaspora in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Curacao, Jamaica, Suriname. It draws the history of the Portuguese nation and the problematic of crypto judaism - or marranism; it traverses the Portuguese funerary sites anterior to and after the purchase of the cemetery, analyzes the epigraphic program and its decoration according to the times, the spaces, the languages, the individuals themselves, the Nation, the brotherhoods; it deals with the discourse of Judaism in Enlightenment Europe under the angle of the salvation of the living and the dead, of the vision of the hereafter.