MemoMarranos

The ‘MemoMarranos’ project (2021-2022) is part of a process to consolidate an international network of researchers and institutions that produce and disseminate knowledge about Jews, ‘Marranos’, antisemitism and the Holocaust.

This project, which has received 34,000 euros in funding, aims to identify relevant documentation for the production and dissemination of more scientific knowledge on the evolution, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day - with an emphasis on the 1930s and the Holocaust period - of the Portuguese who can be classified as ‘marranos’.

The ‘Marranos’ would be Portuguese citizens, also descendants of the “Jews” (until 1496) and the ‘New Christians’ (16th to 18th centuries), who had lost contact with the essence of Sephardic culture and with the other segments of the Jewish Diaspora. They lived, at least until the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, mainly in the central and northern interior of mainland Portugal.

Thus, ‘MemoMarranos’ stems from the importance of enabling better knowledge about this segment of the Portuguese reality, as well as comparing its evolution with other segments of the Jewish Diaspora and with other universes of post-victims of mass violence. The aim is to identify and characterise the relevant documentation - oral (memory and post-memory), written (handwritten and printed), graphic, audiovisual and material.