{"id":131359,"date":"2026-06-14T17:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T15:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=131359"},"modified":"2026-06-14T07:50:52","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T05:50:52","slug":"17-05-124","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=131359","title":{"rendered":"Fernando Pessoa and the Jewish Question"},"content":{"rendered":"<hr>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"center alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.reunion68.com\/Biuletyn\/img\/tablet-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"35%\"><\/a><span style=\"text-decoration: underline; color: #000080;\"><span><strong><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tabletmag.com\/sections\/arts-letters\/articles\/fernando-pessoa-jewish-question\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fernando Pessoa and the Jewish Question<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>Marco Roth<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<hr style=\"height: 15px; background: #d0e6fa; width: 100%;\">\n<div>\n<h4 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>In a forgotten essay, Portugal\u2019s greatest writer resists the rise of antisemitism<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net\/production\/08b7a4b8448453397f86d8914c28d1b7d7d72659-1600x2000.jpg?w=1250&amp;q=70&amp;auto=format&amp;dpr=1\" width=\"80%\"><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em>Illustration by Demetrios Psillos<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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\u2014starting 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\u2019 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 <em>yishuv<\/em>&nbsp;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\u2019d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The tale of these travels reads at times like Jack London or dime-store boys\u2019 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\u2019s \u201cAwakening.\u201d More often he sounds tedious but sweet, in the style of every stoned hippie you\u2019ve ever heard recounting every meal he ate and every cute girl he saw while searching for the meaning of life.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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 \u201csomething too happy to be ours,\u201d and how he met \u201cone of the most lovely Jewesses I have ever seen,\u201d a seventeen year old who was \u201cbeing taken to a hidden and ignoble destination.\u201dThe overall effect is uncannily like much contemporary writing in its seeming obliviousness to any principle of selection or sound storytelling\u2014like a series of travel substack posts\u2014a wandering Jew\u2019s #vanlife for an age before digital media.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"PullQuote PullQuote--left flex flex-col items-center pt1_5 pb3 mt1_75 mb_75 border-bottom-black\">\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"PullQuote__text PullQuote--left__text text-center\"><strong>Pessoa inverts the fascist language of identity politics<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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\u2019s 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\u2014from some Arab shepherds\u2014when 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\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Amerika<\/em>, 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&nbsp;<em>The<\/em>&nbsp;<em>Protocols of the Elders of Zion<\/em>&nbsp;(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\u2014themselves one or two steps removed from poverty\u2014helping out other Jews in genuine need or\u2014like Kamenezky\u2014those who learn to game this international brotherhood of tzedakah.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Originally, the memoir was all written down in Portuguese sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, purportedly by Kamenezky himself, although, as we\u2019ll 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\u2019s finest 20th-century poet and one of the leading lights of 20th-century literary modernism\u2014equal 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\u2014Fernando Pessoa.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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&nbsp;<em>alfarrabista<\/em>, 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 \u201cnaturism,\u201d 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\u2014a bit like the Greenwich Village of Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, and Georgi Gurdjieff.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Kamenezky had become friends with one of these characters: Maria O\u2019Neil, a novelist, theosophist, and doyenne of literary and spiritualist Lisbon; Kamenezky\u2019s widow credited her with helping him compose and edit the memoir and some of his poems; his portrait was painted by Jos\u00e9 Malhoa\u2014a 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 Ant\u00f3nio Salazar\u2019s 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 \u00c1lvaro de Campos. It wasn\u2019t until 1928 that Pessoa revealed these to be part of one of modern literature\u2019s greatest conceptual projects, one that challenged the whole idea of authorship, not to mention any theories of unitary human identity.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The poets Caeiro, Reis, and de Campos were not \u201cpseudonyms\u201d and not, Pessoa insisted, aspects of his personality, since \u201cthe human author of these books has no personality of his own.\u201d Rather, in a novel literary coinage, he termed these authorial personalities \u201cheteronyms,\u201d 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\u2019s 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 \u201ccontained multitudes\u201d and Rimbaud declared \u201cI am another,\u201d Pessoa actually managed to follow through on such grand proclamations.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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\u2019s definitive biography of Pessoa,&nbsp;<em>An Experimental Life<\/em>, 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\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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\u2019d first encountered in bastardized form via a friendship with Aleister Crowley of the \u201cHermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2014Pessoa was a notorious drinker; Kamenezky had at least a couch and most likely a spare room.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Most likely, as with many friendships, sympathy and opportunity combined with convenience to bring them together. Pessoa, a man who could write \u201cTo travel! To change countries! To be forever someone else,\u201d took up with another man who\u2019d actually traveled nearly everywhere on earth.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The only enduring trace of their relationship appeared once Kamenezky succeeded in publishing his poems, titled&nbsp;<em>Alma Errante<\/em>, or&nbsp;<em>Wandering Soul<\/em>. The copy in Pessoa\u2019s archive contains the handwritten dedication \u201cTo my dear friend, Fernando Pessoa, from his sincere friend and admirer Eliezer Kamenezky,\u201d signed March 2, 1932. The edition comes with a preface written and signed by Pessoa, as himself.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<div class=\"Divider Divider--short-rule overflow-hidden\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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\u2019t 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, \u201cthe author of these books doesn\u2019t know what it means to exist, nor whether Hamlet nor whether Shakespeare is more real, or truly real.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">What Pessoa does with&nbsp;<em>Alma Errante<\/em>&nbsp;is a similar kind of ground-shifting exercise in perspective. By turns mischievous, equivocal, and ironic, Pessoa\u2019s preface becomes a platform for his considerations on that great European theme on the essence of \u201cJewishness\u201d; 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 \u201cidealistic and romantic like all Jews, when they are not the opposite.\u201d This clearly reads like a joke. But at whose expense?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">In Zenith\u2019s account, Kamenezky appears as the \u201cunwitting dupe\u201d 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\u2019d suggest that Pessoa has a different target in mind and uses the occasion to tackle Portuguese antisemitism.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"PullQuote PullQuote--right flex flex-col items-center pt1_5 pb3 mt1_75 mb_75 border-bottom-black\">\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"PullQuote__text PullQuote--right__text text-center\"><strong>His conclusion reads like a joke\u2014but at whose expense?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class=\"ArticleContentSwitch ArticleView__content-switch bradford text-article-body-md font-300 mxauto\">\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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, \u201ca banal bourgeois tidily managing his theater, lending money at interest to fellow townspeople and at the same time writing&nbsp;<em>The Tempest&nbsp;<\/em>&#8230;\u201d 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 \u201cmaterialism,\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">And here the essay takes another unexpected turn, tackling head on the conspiracist claims made by \u201cenemies of the Jewish people\u201d: that Jews have a secret agenda to undermine and overthrow \u201cGreco-Roman, Christian European civilization.\u201d Pessoa manages to be unusually direct for him, but still ironic. Contrary to what people say, it wasn\u2019t Jews or Freemasons who fomented the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution; it was the tyranny of the&nbsp;<em>ancien r\u00e9gime&nbsp;<\/em>and of czarist Russia that had brought about their own downfall. Not only that, Pessoa continues, but \u201csocial idealism\u201d has its own roots in Christian teachings and Christ\u2019s doctrines. \u201cAnd so social radicalism can only be called Jewish in the sense that Christianity is Jewish.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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 (p\u00e1tria). Pessoa, however, characterizes this social radicalism as a state of feeling, a type of sentimentalism that he crucially refers to as \u201cum saudosismo\u201d:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<blockquote><p><strong>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\u2014patriarchal and simple\u2014of that same homeland.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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\u2019s 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\u2014according to Pessoa\u2014is that they are Portuguese.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">If we remember that Pessoa is writing this in 1932, the target audience\u2014those readers whose heads Pessoa most wanted to mess with\u2014starts 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\u2019s New State in Portugal often identified the state\u2019s internal enemies under the heading of \u201cJudeo-Freemasonry.\u201d Pessoa\u2019s long digression that disentangles Jewish mysticism from Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism\u2014while also noting the deep Judeo-Christian roots of both\u2014makes more sense if he\u2019s writing to an audience of poetry readers who might be\u2014in today\u2019s terminology\u2014\u201cfascist curious.\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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 \u201cuncoordinated and diffuse.\u201d 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, \u201cnor,\u201d he adds, \u201cclearly, no Jew could have written this preface.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The irony is that the author of these sentences knows and elsewhere acknowledges himself to be of Jewish ancestry. Pessoa\u2019s family on his paternal grandmother\u2019s side, the Cunhas, were documented \u201cNew Christians,\u201d that is, Portuguese Jews who\u2019d 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 \u201ca mixture of Jews and nobles.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Pessoa, however, wasn\u2019t only privately Jewish. On at least one previous occasion, his writing had been publicly declared an example of \u201cJewish thought\u201d and his photograph printed as an example of \u201cAsiatic\u201d Jewish racial characteristics in a book published in 1925, ominously titled&nbsp;<em>A Invas\u00e3o dos Judeus<\/em>&nbsp;(i.e.<em>The Invasion of the Jews<\/em>). Its author, Pessoa\u2019s friend M\u00e1rio Saa, no less Jewish than Pessoa, purported to expose the pernicious influence of Jewishness in Portuguese politics and culture. It\u2019s 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&nbsp;<em>South Park<\/em>&nbsp;style deadpan satire making fun of a type of antisemitism fashionable in reactionary literary circles influenced by Charles Maurras\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Action Fran\u00e7aise<\/em>&nbsp;and rapidly gaining general popularity throughout Europe.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The last sentence of Pessoa\u2019s preface is also a type of self-negating antisemitism but different from Saa\u2019s gonzo embrace of paranoid racial purity tests. Pessoa\u2019s 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 \u201cJewish traits.\u201d 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\u2014if not the author\u2014for the wholly Portuguese poetry of Caeiro, Reis, and \u00c1lvaro de Campos\u2014himself, as Pessoa described him, \u201cneither pale nor dark, vaguely corresponding to the Portuguese Jewish type.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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\u2014tradition, national character, and racial character\u2014revealing 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 \u201cTradition and the Individual Talent\u201d 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\u2019s mediocre poetry, but\u2014even more importantly in the shadow of what was about to overtake European Jewry\u2014for 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\u2019ve visited his grave in Lisbon\u2019s Jewish cemetery.<\/span><\/p>\n<hr>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"ArticleEndNote BlockContent col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 mxauto bradford text-article-body-md italic font-300\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><strong>ENDNOTE:<\/strong>&nbsp;<em>Pessoa explains his relationship to the voices of his heteronyms with a moving comparison. The man who writes down the poems \u201cwrites 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.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019d 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\u2019d encountered. Through him I learned about the friendship between Pessoa and Kamenezky and was able to access the text of Kamenezky\u2019s memoir and the edition of Kamenezky\u2019s poems with Pessoa\u2019s preface. Which one of us is therefore the author, which one the disembodied voice, I can\u2019t say and have no wish to disentangle.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<hr>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"AuthorBioBlock col-12 lg:col-10 xl-wide:col-8 w100 mt6 mxauto\">\n<div class=\"AuthorBioBlock__container graebenbach mt1_5 text-section-details-sm font-300 color-red\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><em><strong>Marco Roth<\/strong> is Tablet\u2019s Critic at Large.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<hr style=\"height: 15px; background: #d0e6fa; width: 100%;\">\n<div id=\"content\" class=\"content-alignment\">\n<div id=\"watch-description\" class=\"yt-uix-button-panel\">\n<div id=\"watch-description-text\" style=\"text-align: center;\">\n<p><em>Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion&#8217;68,<\/em><em><br \/>\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion&#8217;68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.<br \/>\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:<br \/>\n<\/em><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong><em><a style=\"color: #000080;\" href=\"mailto:webmaster@reunion68.com\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<hr style=\"width: 100%;\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fernando Pessoa and the Jewish Question Marco Roth In a forgotten essay, Portugal\u2019s 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[33,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131359"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=131359"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131378,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131359\/revisions\/131378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=131359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=131359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=131359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}