Hello friends! I am back with day 2 of my paragraph writing series while in Lisbon. First, I just want to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who has read the first post – I have been so grateful for all the enthusiasm for this little ol’ idea of mine. Yesterday, I gave a bit of a high-level overview of the project that I’m hoping to do while here. Yet – as turns out to be true with so many things in life – ideas can be very different than the reality. I don’t say this to be entirely cynical, but rather after a somewhat frustrating day at the archive that proved to be a good lesson in why this kind of research can be challenging – yet followed by a different in-person experience that simultaneously demonstrated why it is so critical to still visit the place where this research can be done, especially when said research is connected to historically marginalized or minority communities.
So – the reality. Today I arrived for the second time at the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (The National Library of Portugal), where I hoped to gain physical access to a variety of documents that I expected would be helpful to my exploration and eventual re-creation of the experience and recipes of medieval Portuguese Jews. While soliciting the funding for this project, I had identified a few documents that I thought would be useful by searching the online archive. Before even arriving to the archive, though, I was notified that the documents I wished to see (which included a rare 16th century reproduction of a Hebrew Bible dedicated to the one and only Doña Gracia Mendes, the famous Portuguese Sephardic philanthropist and literal Renaissance woman) were not available for my physical perusal. Not to be deterred, I determined that once I arrived at the library I could try to get access to a different set of documents, ideally ones that I had not yet found in my online pre-search. Despite my best efforts today, I wasn’t able to see anything in person.
But – don’t despair, fair reader -- today was not completely a loss! In fact, I had better in-person success with a delightful afternoon visit to the Jewish Cultural Center on Rua Judiaria (Street of the Jewish Corner) in the Alfama neighborhood of Lisbon. I was put in touch by an old friend (hi Ashley!) with my new friend Luciano, who runs this center as what he calls a meeting place and a space of dialogue for the modern Jewish community in Lisbon. We had a lovely chat, exchanging tidbits about what being Jewish on the Iberian Peninsula means these days and the irony of the fact that judiaria, the word that once referred to the Jewish quarter found in almost every town in medieval Portugal, now denotes “a mess” in modern Portuguese (interestingly, the type of mess relevant only to young children and drunken adults). In a physical manifestation of this change over time, the term now only pertains to one street in modern Lisbon. I have more thoughts on this to share in future posts, but I will leave it here for today with my excitement for future in-person research revelations and delightful surprises like this one.
The front façade of the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal.
As a contrast, the welcoming-but-subtle front door of the Jewish Cultural Center on Rua Judiaria.
The sweet mosaics put up by Luciano outside of the JCC next to a hunk of the mountain upon which the buildings of Rua Judiaria and the old wall of the city still sit.