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.