A Psychogeographical Lament for the Jewish Children of São Tomé

When Jews travel they take with them a burden of memory that defines and constitutes the raw materials for their historical achievements in those places to which they have come. A restless people, yet weary of the journey, always longing for home and familiar signs of where they first were, where they rested for a short while — a year or two, a century, or a millennium –and that eventual achieved land in which they shall be like all other peoples again. For the medieval Jew, exile, dispersion, wandering, anxious waiting for the knock at the door or the gathering on a wet cold morning, or the distant cries of a pogrom in progress, all warn that the expected time has come to be on the way yet again.

It is in the light of psychogeography that we now examine the long history of the Children of São Tomé, Jewish children forcibly taken from their parents in 1493 by authorities in Portugal, converted to Catholicism, and shipped to the uninhabited African island of São Tomé where they were meant to establish the sugar industry. Up to 2000 children, between the ages of two and thirteen, were sent to this crocodile-infested island off the Bight [Bay] of Benin, where at least half died within the first year of tropical diseases and injuries by wild animals or in hard labour among thieves, whores, soldiers, and black slaves. Though some children were married to each other in the critical hours before the abductions in Lisbon, the survivors were later coupled with Congolese slaves on São Tomé, each of the pair was manumitted [freed on the island] in return for this Christian marriage. In the final years of the 16th century, their mestizo grandchildren and great grandchildren, the core of a land-owning elite on the island, sailed to Brazil when a combination of unrest and slave rebellions, invasions by pirates, and a diversion of the slave and the sugar trade elsewhere in Africa or South America undercut the viability of the local economy. After about 40 years of mental “wandering in the wilderness” when northeastern Brazil was occupied by the Dutch, descendants of the Children of São Tomé came out as Jews and joined the synagogues established in Recife and other coastal towns.

Three things point to a hidden, probably unconscious, Jewishness of the immigrants and their mestizo descendants while they reformulated themselves as a mixed European-African land-owning class for a century on São Tomé. One is the slur fellow settlers made against them as Judaizers; second, the suspicion of the Church that they were backsliders and heretics, contrary to the evidence; and, third, the violence, rebelliousness, and xenophobic quality of the island’s history during the 16th century, making it stand out amongst Portugal’s tropical colonies.

This collective hostile behavior signals a shared trauma and resentment of father (civil and monarchic government) and mother (Church), since the original Jewish children felt that both their own parents and their new surrogate parents and godparents had failed them. Their natural parents, in being too weak to resist the Portuguese soldiers and priests who took them away and sent them into exile. The clerics who were supposed to give them paternalistic care; criminals and eccentrics swept up on the streets of Portugal for forced settlement on São Tomé who were supposed to act as guardians; the Church herself which professed spiritual guidance and protection; and the king as father of his people, who sold them to his captains as virtual slaves to work the sugar plantations on the island. The reputation for both extreme cruelty to slaves and others on São Tomé and anti-authoritarian independence signals the kind of projective cruelty typical of abused children.

These Jewish children of São Tomé were not from assimilated families, but from pious communities in northern Castile who resisted conversions throughout the 14th and 15th centuries and who crossed into Portugal in 1492 but could not afford the transit tax imposed by Lisbon. After nearly a year, many adults were arrested and enslaved by the crown. As parents became frightened and disoriented, their demeanour changed. They lost patience with their children and demanded a strict obedience — how else could they survive the dislocations? Jewish mothers and fathers behaved with uncharacteristic irrationality, anger, and rage — projecting their own sense of guilt and shame. The children sensed the anxiety and fear in their families, and were explicitly instructed in the possibilities of self-inflicted martyrdom (kiddush ha-shem or Sanctification of the Name). These youngsters felt ambiguous disappointments and shame at the inability of their par-

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ents to protect them or of God to rescue them, along with the physical wounds of the kidnapping and the hypocrisy and cynicism of their Christian captors, civil and ecclesiastical.

The most painful feature of the separation of the youngest children — two- to five-year-olds — from their mothers on the dockside in Lisbon would have been their inner experience of the fear in their mother’s eyes, the terrible “red glow” that Alan Schore speaks of — they looked into their parent’s eyes for reassurance and support but could find only fear. For the older children it was surely the humiliation of their parents by the soldiers and friars grabbing the youngsters from them and then submerging them in makeshift baptismal fonts. This nightmare on the docks became concentrated into the long ordeal of the voyage to Africa.

But how could a sea voyage of escape from São Tomé a century later still function in a both mythical and psychological way to begin the healing process for the third and fourth generations of survivors, culminating in the re-establishment of personal and collective identity that would become visible under Dutch rule in Brazil? The first journey’s overcrowded ships laden with frightened, confused children formed the physical matrix for the traumatic memories to begin their somatic gestation. These youngsters, used to the loving care and respect which Jewish parents typically gave to their offspring in the late Middle Ages, were suddenly pushed about by rough soldiers, and forced to accommodate themselves to a cargo of robbers and whores, rapists and murderers — the riffraff of Lisbon’s underworld — men and women who would take great delight in teasing, mocking, and assaulting these newly “converted” Jews. The clerics were likely to be the same individuals who in the first years of the colony were notorious for spending more time in the slave trade than in their ecclesiastical duties. These boys and girls were given a cursory but frightening introduction to Catholicism. Siblings, cousins, and friends might have tried to stay together, but the spiteful and sadistic character of the adults would counter these wishes. Whatever the children were told about why they were taken from their parents, baptized under duress, and being transported to São Tomé would make no sense, even if they could understand Portuguese. Aboard the crowded ships, the trauma of abandonment was compounded by the harsh treatment and jibes of the sailors, whores, and thieves sent along with them.

The adolescents may have heard stories about the fate of other Jews put aboard ships bound for Africa and then, if not shoved into shark-infested waters or drowned in storms which wrecked the vessels, deliberately abandoned on some desert coast or sold to Muslim slave-traders. There were also the traditional biblical tales and rabbinical anecdotes concerning the Babylonian Exile and the legends of the Exodus from Egypt. On the eve of the Spanish expulsions, rabbis “reminded the [expellees] of the miracles of the exodus from Egypt.” (Valeriu Marcu, The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, trans. Moray Firth, 1935, p. 151) In the children’s confused, frightened state these iconographic journeys would merge with their experience for a dual form of rejection and despair.

Each ratcheting-up of abuse and humiliation wore down the structures of consciousness and reasoning in these children sailing towards São Tomé, debilitated their normal modes of evaluating the differences between reality and fantasy, and drove the minds of these young people, individually and collectively, into a focus on the myths of dispersion, exile, and wandering, providing the only approximation of meaning possible under the circumstances. Later, Jewish chroniclers lamented the seizing of the children and retold their stories in terms of the monstrous reptiles on São Tomé which devoured more than half who arrived, perhaps as a way of mythologizing the havoc of tropical diseases and harsh physical labor needed to carve sugar plantations out of the jungle. However, the real trauma for the children remained embodied in the visceral memories of the sea voyage.

The second collective journey proved quite different for the descendants of the Children of São Tomé, yet similar enough to play a mythic and psychological role in the resolution to their long post-traumatic stress. On the ships to Brazil, the descendants — the mestizo landowners and middle-class brokers in the slave and sugar trade — felt they were leaving an island with no hope and going to begin a new life in the richness of Brazil. Escaping from the anarchy and instability of the island, they also shared fragments of memory from their parents and grandparents about the first journey from Lisbon in 1493, as well as hints of a lost Jewishness, triggering deeper, unconscious anxieties.

How these psychosomatic triggers work can be explained by psychogeography. The children’s journeying on less-than-royal roads — the paths of exile, the back alleys, the tracks of humili-

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ating defeat, and the uncharted seas of slavery — leads us to the highly complex, multi-layered illusions of minds reshaped by stress and trauma. Unable to cope with the intensity and suddenness of their experiences, an entire psychoclass may reorganize its structures of conscious being and its psychic body. (Henri Ey, Traité des Hallucinations, 1973) This is partly in response to affects and memories too painful to accept as part of the real and rational world, so that the group of individuals rejects the traumatizing event altogether or in part, substituting a more acceptable version, in which a different act altogether occurred, other people suffered, the secret meaning of their suffering is disclosed, or they are the dominant beings or what they do is praiseworthy and inverts their helplessness.

These mind-generated fantasy characters mixed with culturally-produced mythic heroes in scenarios which parodied reality. Such hallucinations were sufficiently constituted of real memories to convince the weakened structures of censorship and reality-testing that they were true perceptions of experience. Because the phenomenon was collective, the traumatized children of São Tomé reinforced one another’s impressions of this pseudo-reality. Fifteen years later, their pains were renewed by their forced marriages to black slaves from the mainland, thus integrating African experiences, memories, and myths into the Jewish converso imago. Because those African slaves, too, had to be shipped to São Tomé, the central somatic memory of the Jews’ voyage absorbed retrospectively the Africans’ traumatic experiences as well.

The image of the voyage joins several strands: the existential ordeal on the docks and of the voyage; the culturally-inherited Jewish mythology of journeys of exile and redemption; the reinforcing experiences of cruelty and abusiveness on the island; and the integrated memories and tales of the Africans they were forced to marry as a condition of manumission.

When social and economic life on São Tomé became untenable in the last decades of the 16th century, the mestizo elite decided to move to Brazil. Their mixed-race experience, hitherto accommodated to conditions on the island, as a New Christian-African class that formed the core of the land-owning and governing population, underwent a transformation. To get to Brazil they had to sail across the Atlantic Ocean by ship. The descendants of the original forced converts at once consciously re-experienced the physical journey as an exodus — an escape from the hopelessness of the failing island economy and social hegemony — and at the same time unconsciously re-established contact with the more or less dormant images of Jewish identity embodied in the myth of the journey.

The first journey by sea to São Tomé would have been ambiguously remembered. The forced departure from familiar life to the harsh unknowns of a sugar and slave island condensed the cumulative memories, apprehensions, and internalized physical pains of the entire experience of the group. The memory-image of this journey suppressed for three or four generations was awakened by the collective exodus to Brazil, and then, precisely because it was an unconscious, deeply somatic container of individual, group, and mythic-historical meanings, provided means to begin the healing processes for the trans-generational traumatic abuse of the children. For many, though obviously not all, of the descendants of the original young anusim (forced converts) a sign of their recovery was their eventual re-joining of the Jewish communities established by the Dutch during their brief rule in northeastern Brazil.

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