Fernando Pessoa and the Jewish Question
Marco Roth
In a forgotten essay, Portugal’s greatest writer resists the rise of antisemitism
Illustration by Demetrios Psillos
Nearly anywhere it was possible for a Jew at the beginning of the 20th century to set foot, Eliezer Kamenezky set foot. From his birthplace in Luhansk, he first made the rounds of czarist Russia while apprenticed to a touring Italian opera company. He then emigrated successively to London and the United States—starting off in New York before setting out for California, only getting as far as Cincinnati and Louisville, Kentucky, hoboing on trains before reverse-emigrating to Germany, from which he self-deported to Russia. There, he was jailed for not having a passport, he discovered the mystic vegetarian writings of a Polish Jewish doctor that would change his life, and he traveled throughout the Romanovs’ gulag archipelago as an unwilling guest of the state. Freed at last, he tried to settle down, studying at a cantorial school in Odesa before taking flight again to Argentina, via Germany, then to Brazil, Marseille, Algeria, Tunisia, onward to Port Said and Lebanon, entering the Holy Land clandestinely on foot through the Galilee, visiting communities of both the old and new yishuv and staying at Greek Orthodox monasteries in and around Jerusalem, before going on all the way to Benares via Aden and Bombay. Unsatisfied, he eventually made it back to Brazil. All of this happened between 1903 and 1911 before he’d turned 23, and it was done with no money apart from what he earned in various odd jobs and day labors in his various ports of call.
The tale of these travels reads at times like Jack London or dime-store boys’ adventure tales of the 1890s; you can learn how to stow away on a commercial freighter, hop trains, or how to survive a lice-ridden Russian prison. These practical, hard-earned instructions are served with a hefty side of moralizing: Did you know that there are men of such low and desperate character that they would not only sell you a threadbare pair of trousers for a hunk of bread but then steal them back from you the next day? When he forgets to be didactic and gives into his fascination with gamblers, drunkards, prostitutes, and other kinds of lowlife, Kamenezky can sound like the narrator of Isaac Babel’s “Awakening.” More often he sounds tedious but sweet, in the style of every stoned hippie you’ve ever heard recounting every meal he ate and every cute girl he saw while searching for the meaning of life.
On a single page describing his voyage from Brazil to Marseille, Kamenezky explains how he used to eat only half a rice ration so he would have something left over to sell at the port, how watching the sunset expanded his soul and gave him a sense of “something too happy to be ours,” and how he met “one of the most lovely Jewesses I have ever seen,” a seventeen year old who was “being taken to a hidden and ignoble destination.”The overall effect is uncannily like much contemporary writing in its seeming obliviousness to any principle of selection or sound storytelling—like a series of travel substack posts—a wandering Jew’s #vanlife for an age before digital media.
Pessoa inverts the fascist language of identity politics
As is often the case with these kinds of rambling memoirs of rambling men, the most valuable contributions to posterity, particularly Jewish posterity, were only dimly present in the author’s mind as he wrote. His adventures turn out to be less interesting than the varied social structures and folkways that permitted them. Kamenezky travels the world as a Jew, never explicitly hiding who he is except one time—from some Arab shepherds—when he chooses to pass as a Russian Orthodox monk. He makes his way through a network of official Jewish agencies, charities, an uncle in New York (just like in Kafka’s Amerika, except that Kamenezky is straightaway put to work hauling blocks of ice), a matzo baker in Cincinnati, synagogues across North Africa and the Arab Middle East, a bohemian diaspora of Ashkenaz artists in Alexandria, a chain of Ukrainian Jewish farming settlements in Argentina. Here is a glimpse of a vast interconnected world of Jews helping Jews that reads as the true-to-life obverse of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (published in 1903, in Russia, the same year that Kamenezky began his wanderings when he ran away to join the opera). There is no grand conspiracy, just a filigree of networks formed by communities and individuals—themselves one or two steps removed from poverty—helping out other Jews in genuine need or—like Kamenezky—those who learn to game this international brotherhood of tzedakah.
Originally, the memoir was all written down in Portuguese sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, purportedly by Kamenezky himself, although, as we’ll see, he had some assistance. It would have been his third or fourth language, not bad for someone who dropped out of yeshiva at 14. I was able to read this remarkable, never published, and otherwise wholly overlooked document of 20th-century Jewish history in a neatly typed English translation made in 1931 by the man widely celebrated (posthumously) as Portugal’s finest 20th-century poet and one of the leading lights of 20th-century literary modernism—equal in degree to Kafka or Joyce, the creator of both a poetry and a poetics of tradition and individual talent, self and nationhood, that surpasses in sophistication anything dreamed up by Eliot and Pound—Fernando Pessoa.
And thereby hangs a fascinating tale of a peculiar friendship between Jew and gentile, immigrant and native, unfolding in Lisbon over a few short years close to the climax of the previous age of European antisemitism. Not much is known about how the two men met. By the late 1920s, Kamenezky had settled in Lisbon after years in Brazil; he was an alfarrabista, or antiquarian book and antique dealer with a shop in Bairro Alto, close to where Pessoa lived. He occasionally wrote and published pamphlets on the benefits of vegetarianism and what was then called “naturism,” part nudism and part hiking. His reasons were less concerned with the well-being of animals than fueled by a quasi-gnostic belief in human perfectibility through an elimination diet for the soul. We can speculate a little about the scene: bohemian, a melting pot of various spiritualisms and mysticisms that would branch off into future wellness fads and progressive schooling ideologies after nurturing a lot of mediocre art and a few works of transcendent genius—a bit like the Greenwich Village of Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, and Georgi Gurdjieff.
Kamenezky had become friends with one of these characters: Maria O’Neil, a novelist, theosophist, and doyenne of literary and spiritualist Lisbon; Kamenezky’s widow credited her with helping him compose and edit the memoir and some of his poems; his portrait was painted by José Malhoa—a self-styled Manet of Portuguese painting, then in the last decade of his life. Compared with these luminaries of bohemia, Pessoa was a figure of modest reputation: a literary jack-of-all-trades, an editor of various small magazines, a contrarian polemicist and controversialist literary critic, a translator both to and from Portuguese, as well as occasional adman (he penned the first jingle for Coca-Cola in Portugal, before the soft drink was banned by the health ministry of António Salazar’s Estado Novo, or New State, fascist dictatorship). His best-known and most admired poems had been published in a range of styles under a trio of different names: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. It wasn’t until 1928 that Pessoa revealed these to be part of one of modern literature’s greatest conceptual projects, one that challenged the whole idea of authorship, not to mention any theories of unitary human identity.
The poets Caeiro, Reis, and de Campos were not “pseudonyms” and not, Pessoa insisted, aspects of his personality, since “the human author of these books has no personality of his own.” Rather, in a novel literary coinage, he termed these authorial personalities “heteronyms,” endowed with their own distinct literary styles, biographies, contrasting philosophies, and politics. They were voices in his head that originated somewhere outside his head, like characters in a play but where all the world was literally the stage. Aside from these three major heteronyms, at least a hundred more emerged from the steamer trunk containing Pessoa’s archives in 1983, including a whole series of English heteronyms who wrote poetry, philosophical essays, and even some commentaries on their Portuguese counterparts. Where Whitman wrote that he “contained multitudes” and Rimbaud declared “I am another,” Pessoa actually managed to follow through on such grand proclamations.
Such a poetry of plural and dispersed identities and styles was not conducive to great material success or glamorous recognition in a single short human life. According to Richard Zenith’s definitive biography of Pessoa, An Experimental Life, the initial relationship between Pessoa and Kamenezky came about because Pessoa owed money around town to various tailors and booksellers (whether Kamenezky was one of them Zenith doesn’t say), whereas Kamenezky needed a freelance editor and translator to help with his literary endeavors and the dissemination of his more practical spiritual teachings into English and French. In addition to the memoir, already written in 1927, though still in search of a publisher, he was at work on a book of poems.
Another possibility is that before any commercial relationship existed, the two men had met and bonded over mutual interests in various esoterica and the occult. Pessoa had a long running fascination with Kabbalah, which he’d first encountered in bastardized form via a friendship with Aleister Crowley of the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.” Kamenezky was a spiritual type and also dealt in the kind of books that Pessoa sought to nourish his fascination with esoteric systems of knowledge, whether astrology, Rosicrucianism, or Freemasonry. The man who took over Kamenezky’s shop tells Zenith that Pessoa used to sleep off benders in a basement room there. Zenith includes the anecdote but dismisses it as a typical piece of an apparently vast circulating trove of apocryphal Pessoa stories after he inspects the room and pronounces it barely fit to stand up in. Like all good apocrypha, however, the story probably approximates something that really happened—Pessoa was a notorious drinker; Kamenezky had at least a couch and most likely a spare room.
Most likely, as with many friendships, sympathy and opportunity combined with convenience to bring them together. Pessoa, a man who could write “To travel! To change countries! To be forever someone else,” took up with another man who’d actually traveled nearly everywhere on earth.
The only enduring trace of their relationship appeared once Kamenezky succeeded in publishing his poems, titled Alma Errante, or Wandering Soul. The copy in Pessoa’s archive contains the handwritten dedication “To my dear friend, Fernando Pessoa, from his sincere friend and admirer Eliezer Kamenezky,” signed March 2, 1932. The edition comes with a preface written and signed by Pessoa, as himself.
A signed Pessoa preface was by no means an unqualified endorsement. He liked to heighten the contradictions between the different characters who inhabited his universe, whether they were his various imaginary friends, or, like Kamenezky, endowed with their own independent bodily existence. A preface wasn’t just an opportunity to make distinctions, but also to philosophize about the relationship of poetry to reality. This was a man who, while introducing his heteronyms, could write, with total sincerity, “the author of these books doesn’t know what it means to exist, nor whether Hamlet nor whether Shakespeare is more real, or truly real.”
What Pessoa does with Alma Errante is a similar kind of ground-shifting exercise in perspective. By turns mischievous, equivocal, and ironic, Pessoa’s preface becomes a platform for his considerations on that great European theme on the essence of “Jewishness”; it is also, equally a semiparodic play on a whole way of talking and thinking about Jews that fused 19th century racial pseudo-science with Idealist Philosophy with some old-style Catholic antisemitism baked in. Introducing Kamenezky with a brief biographical sketch, Pessoa concludes that he is “idealistic and romantic like all Jews, when they are not the opposite.” This clearly reads like a joke. But at whose expense?
In Zenith’s account, Kamenezky appears as the “unwitting dupe” of Pessoa. Instead of offering a proper introduction to what is frankly mediocre poetry, Pessoa uses the preface to ventilate and work through some familiar and unfamiliar stereotypes about Jews with some extensive digressions on Freemasonry and national character. While I agree that the poetry is largely a pretext, I’d suggest that Pessoa has a different target in mind and uses the occasion to tackle Portuguese antisemitism.
His conclusion reads like a joke—but at whose expense?
The first part of the preface is devoted to the elaboration of a recognizably Pessoaistic system by which every nation has a mystical counterpart that is either its opposite or more intense shadow, though only in exceptional cases contained in the same individual. The practical and businesslike nature of the English, for example, also explains why their lyric poetry is ethereal and subtle, with Shakespeare as the paragon, “a banal bourgeois tidily managing his theater, lending money at interest to fellow townspeople and at the same time writing The Tempest …” Appearances in this way are both deceiving and revealing. Applied to the Jews, this same logic of opposites explains how a people known for their evident love of money, their “materialism,” as Pessoa politely names it, could also produce the esoteric mysticism of Kabbalah as well as what Pessoa sometimes calls radical egalitarianism or social radicalism.
And here the essay takes another unexpected turn, tackling head on the conspiracist claims made by “enemies of the Jewish people”: that Jews have a secret agenda to undermine and overthrow “Greco-Roman, Christian European civilization.” Pessoa manages to be unusually direct for him, but still ironic. Contrary to what people say, it wasn’t Jews or Freemasons who fomented the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution; it was the tyranny of the ancien régime and of czarist Russia that had brought about their own downfall. Not only that, Pessoa continues, but “social idealism” has its own roots in Christian teachings and Christ’s doctrines. “And so social radicalism can only be called Jewish in the sense that Christianity is Jewish.”
For all that, Pessoa concedes that there is a distinctly Jewish form of social radicalism and idealism, arising, he says, from the emotions associated with having lost their homeland (pátria). Pessoa, however, characterizes this social radicalism as a state of feeling, a type of sentimentalism that he crucially refers to as “um saudosismo”:
Jewish social idealism is, overall, a saudade and a kind of hatred, or more properly, a saudosismo and a defense. The yearning for the lost homeland necessarily takes the form of a yearning for the presumed original form—patriarchal and simple—of that same homeland.
Pessoa characterizes this exclusively Jewish structure of feeling with a word linked to one of the key untranslatable terms in the Portuguese language, a word that Portuguese intellectuals before, during, and after Pessoa’s lifetime have taken as a signifier of essential Portugueseness, namely saudade, a specific category of yearning that can refer to a sudden sense of loss or sadness amid a situation of plenitude, or equally the pleasure that one takes from longing to return to an impossible state that might be both a moment of glory and a simple home pleasure. Put simply, one of the most distinctively Jewish things about the Jews—according to Pessoa—is that they are Portuguese.
If we remember that Pessoa is writing this in 1932, the target audience—those readers whose heads Pessoa most wanted to mess with—starts to become clearer. Like the emerging Nazi Party in Germany who referred to the perils of Judeo-Bolshevism, the explicitly Catholic reactionary Iberian far-right then coalescing around the Falange in Spain and Salazar’s New State in Portugal often identified the state’s internal enemies under the heading of “Judeo-Freemasonry.” Pessoa’s long digression that disentangles Jewish mysticism from Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism—while also noting the deep Judeo-Christian roots of both—makes more sense if he’s writing to an audience of poetry readers who might be—in today’s terminology—“fascist curious.” Rather than coming at them head on, he offers, in the realm of European nationalism and identity politics of the 1930s, a challenge to identitarian thinking similar to the one he poses through his own heteronymy.
At the same time, returning to literature and national character at the end of the preface, Pessoa ends with what can only be interpreted as an obscure and also somewhat dark private joke. All Jewish literature, all Semitic literature, even, Pessoa claims, is “uncoordinated and diffuse.” Jews are incapable of writing with the logical beauty of a Greek ode, neither could they write anything as beautiful as a line of Aeschylus that Pessoa then translates into Portuguese, “nor,” he adds, “clearly, no Jew could have written this preface.”
The irony is that the author of these sentences knows and elsewhere acknowledges himself to be of Jewish ancestry. Pessoa’s family on his paternal grandmother’s side, the Cunhas, were documented “New Christians,” that is, Portuguese Jews who’d converted rather than accept expulsion from Portugal. In an autobiographical document he drew up a few months before his death in 1935, Pessoa describes his ancestry as “a mixture of Jews and nobles.”
Pessoa, however, wasn’t only privately Jewish. On at least one previous occasion, his writing had been publicly declared an example of “Jewish thought” and his photograph printed as an example of “Asiatic” Jewish racial characteristics in a book published in 1925, ominously titled A Invasão dos Judeus (i.e.The Invasion of the Jews). Its author, Pessoa’s friend Mário Saa, no less Jewish than Pessoa, purported to expose the pernicious influence of Jewishness in Portuguese politics and culture. It’s unclear whether Saa was writing an authentic work of Jewish self-hatred, in the manner of Otto Weininger, or if this was an early instance of South Park style deadpan satire making fun of a type of antisemitism fashionable in reactionary literary circles influenced by Charles Maurras’s Action Française and rapidly gaining general popularity throughout Europe.
The last sentence of Pessoa’s preface is also a type of self-negating antisemitism but different from Saa’s gonzo embrace of paranoid racial purity tests. Pessoa’s deliberate misrepresentation of his background is a performance similar to the conversion and renunciation once made by his New Christian ancestors. At the same time, the official renunciation makes a total mockery of any theories about essential and ineradicable “Jewish traits.” It is the descendant of Jews who not only makes the line of Aeschylus into a beautiful Portuguese phrase, but also serves as the vessel—if not the author—for the wholly Portuguese poetry of Caeiro, Reis, and Álvaro de Campos—himself, as Pessoa described him, “neither pale nor dark, vaguely corresponding to the Portuguese Jewish type.”
Writing as a Jew who was not a Jew, through the work of his friend Kamenezky, a Jew who willingly always remained a Jew, Pessoa was able to invert the fascist language of early 1930s European identity politics—tradition, national character, and racial character—revealing them to careful readers as hollow essentialism with no essence behind it. Unlike T.S. Eliot, who hid behind the mask of poetic impersonality in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” to make the case for poetry as the exclusive preserve of people like him, Pessoa used his own impersonality in the preface to plead a case, not for his friend’s mediocre poetry, but—even more importantly in the shadow of what was about to overtake European Jewry—for his continued existence and freedom to live and write however and wherever he chose. Although they were born a year apart, Kamenezky would outlive Pessoa by 22 years, going on to act in Portuguese films, keeping his antiquarian shop until his death in 1957. I’ve visited his grave in Lisbon’s Jewish cemetery.
ENDNOTE: Pessoa explains his relationship to the voices of his heteronyms with a moving comparison. The man who writes down the poems “writes as if he were being dictated to. And as if the person dictating were a friend (and for that reason could freely ask him to write down what he dictates), the writer finds the dictation interesting, perhaps just out of friendship.” In a roughly analogous way, almost everything of interest I have to say here is thanks to my friend, Nuno Ribeiro, a scholar of Pessoa, his philosophy, and his world. Nuno and I met Pessoaistically, that is we ended up sitting next to each other in a loud restaurant as part of a larger group made up of some poets, a photographer, a set designer for films, and a psychiatrist who’s also a painter. The purpose of the gathering was drinking, which is how Pessoa spent much of his time with those companions who had independent bodies as well as independent voices. Nuno was one of the first Portuguese people I’d met here who was truly open to sharing their life and thoughts with an expat interloper, and I was, as is often the case here, the first real-life Jew he’d encountered. Through him I learned about the friendship between Pessoa and Kamenezky and was able to access the text of Kamenezky’s memoir and the edition of Kamenezky’s poems with Pessoa’s preface. Which one of us is therefore the author, which one the disembodied voice, I can’t say and have no wish to disentangle.
Marco Roth is Tablet’s Critic at Large.
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