O mito do judeu errante em Machado de Assis : entre a errância e a redenção - a reinvenção do imaginário e a subversão da cultura

Abstract

This work aims to investigate the myth of the Wandering Jew in Machado de Assis. This myth, which has populated the Judeo-Christian imaginary of the West, had its origins in the popular belief of the Middle Ages. Ahasverus is the name of the Jew, who in Jerusalem would have mistreated Jesus Christ. As punishment, Ahasverus had been condemned to walk the world until the end of time. The religious discourse has used of this myth to justify the segregation of the Jews, accused of deicides by the death of Jesus. Catholic anti-Judaism culminated in the Inquisition created in the thirteenth century in Europe, which lasted until the 19th century in Portugal and Spain. The artistic and literary use of the myth has generated poems, novels, chronicles, plays, films and operas, prints and paintings. The wandering of Ahasverus as a metaphor for the Jewish diaspora became a genre of the popular imaginary, constituting itself in a cultural text. Some literary productions had anti- Semitic character, like the novel Le Juif Errant, of Eugène Sue, published in 1844. The Portuguese writer Almeida Garrett disputed the work of Sue, who associated the Jesuits with the Wandering Jew, considering them the cholera-morbus of society. In Viagens na Minha Terra [Travels in My Land], Garrett claims that Sue erred and that it was necessary to remake the Wandering Jew. The life of Ahasverus was valorize by Romanticism, rebellion and wandering were synonymous of freedom that generated imagination, dream and fantasy. British Romantic poet Percy Shelley has identified Ahasverus with Prometheus, the Greek tragic myth that rebelled against Zeus in favor of mankind. Machado de Assis seems to have complied with Garrett's recommendation, for he has remade the Wandering Jew stripped of the malignant macula. Reader of the Bible and scholar of the Jewish question, Machado redeemed Ahasverus in the short story “Viver!” (to Live!) of the collection Several Stories, of 1896. The tale, in the form of a dialogue of biblical-philosophical conceptual density between Prometheus and Ahasverus, reveals the secrets of the human condition, love for life, hope and longing for redemption. In a cultural symbiosis, in which History, Philosophy, Religion and Literature intersect, our author has represented the myths with the elements of the tragic-Dionysian and Judeo-Christian mystics. The tale “Viver!” is, therefore, a kind of transcendent utopia of the reinvention of the imaginary and subversion of culture.