Last in a series

Hamilton, Bermuda (special) -- On facing walls at the Bermuda National Gallery, paintings executed by artists of the Portuguese Azores 60 years apart tell the story of immigration to the New World and, generations later, of the return to the Old.

In 1927, Domingos Rebelo painted The Emigrants, depicting a scene in which many American Jews can imagine their own ancestors. A couple sits on a bench with their meager possessions piled near them as they wait for the ship that will take them to the New World. Nearby their son sits on a steamer trunk, his old guitar close by.

The image is so well known in the Azores, and beloved, that allowing it to go to Bermuda for an exhibition actually took a vote of the Azorean Parliament. Tomaz Vieira in 1987 imagined what the grandchildren of that couple might look like as they waited in an airport to take a flight to the Azores for a vacation. Instead of an umbrella to shield himself from the sun, the well-dressed father now holds a camcorder.

THE EMIGRANTS--This evocative 1927  work by Domingos Rebelo of the Azores is  one of the featured pieces in the exhibition  "A Window on the Azores" showing through  February at the Bermuda National Gallery.

No longer clad in shawl and scarf, the mother in a sleevless blouse has a pair of sunglasses perched on her head.The son still has a guitar -- but it is an electric one. 

The motivation for exhibiting more than 100 pieces in the exhibit "A Window on the Azores" was to celebrate 150 years of Portuguese settlement in Bermuda, a nation where one in every ten residents trace their roots back to that great migration.

Although the exhibit which will last through next February has particular interest to the Portuguese community here, it also resonates with members of the Jewish community.

Besides the parallels between their immigrant generations, Jews and the Portuguese from the Azores may share another link, suggests Jewish history lecturer Sandra Cumings Malamed. Some of those Portuguese families who migrated to Bermuda may have Jewish roots.

Malamed, who lives in a re-created American colonial plantation in West Los Angeles, lectures about American Jews who participated in the Revolutionary War. But her research has taken her even further back into history, to the time of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions which led many Jews--often posing as Christians--to immigrate to the New World.

While in Bermuda recently, she went to a hotel pharmacy to purchase some medicine and noted that "the lady behind the counter, her last name was Mello, which is a Portuguese name."

"I said, 'Oh are you Portuguese?' and she said 'yes,' and I said, 'has your family ever discussed with you your roots?' She said very quietly: 'I know that there are a lot of secrets in my background; my family is about to tell the whole family.'"

Malamed said after she told the clerk about some of her conclusions about the Jewish roots of Portuguese settlers in Hawaii, she was invited by the head of the Portuguese Cultural Society in Bermuda to make a presentation there about Jewish life. "I talked about kashrut (kosher dietary laws), and one man said to me, 'Oh, we have a pot that we have had in our family for generations where we can only put things that are made of milk -- that's why!'" Malamed recalled. "And then one other man said 'we have a

THE RENTURNEES--Artist tomaz Vieira poses  by his work "The Renturneea" which is a salute  and update of  "The Emigrents" the famous work by his teacher, Domingos Rebelo

bakery and there is one in Madera (Azores) too, and they bake these flat litle breads in April and we have this celebration.' And I talk to them about Passover and matzoh--and they hadn't heard of matzoh," she said.

"We talked about things fried in oil and they do a whole celebration, but they don't call it Chanukah--they just call it a family celebration. They also clean their houses very thoroughly. They put hard-boiled eggs in meat loaf --that is Jewish!

"They stick very close together. They believe in education for their children. They also believe in education for the whole community. ... And although they are devout Catholics, most of them do not use the name Jesus Christ when they pray. They just pray to God. They don't pray to Mary either. They pray to God."

Malamed's theory is that many Portuguese who live in the Azores are people with Jewish ancestors. So too were many people who left the Azores in the earlier parts of this century for places like Bermuda, Hawaii, and perhaps even San Diego, which is home in the Point Loma area to a thriving Portuguese community.

* * * 

Malamed began developing her theory about five years ago when she noticed on the Big Island of Hawaii that there was a place called the Lucy Henriques Medical Center.

"Now I know that Henriques is a Marrano name," she said, using the word applied in Spain and Portugal to "secret Jews" -- people who professed to be Christians but who secretly practiced Judaism.

"I went 'whoah, what is this Marrano name doing in the middle of this island? How did it get here?' I called the historian of the hospital. .. What she basically said was that Lucy Henriques had married a young Portuguese seaman who had jumped ship at the beginning of the 20th century but that Lucy Henriques herself was a great-great granddaughter of King Kamehameha and had inherited many lands. ... He was a very poor Portuguese person, and didn't have any children. He convinced her that she should do something on each island that would be important to the community, and on the Big Island they needed a medical center..."

Malamed said when she returned to her hotel room, she began thumbing through the Hawaiian telephone book, and found numerous "names that were Marrano names. ... names like Cuelho, Carrera, Figuereda, Figueroa, Seixas. "

Learning that the Hawaiian Portuguese community arrived in family groups in 1869 following a drought in the Azores, Malamed she immediately was struck by some familiar-sounding aspects of the culture of those immigrants.

"Number one, they didn't want to live in grass huts; they couldn't keep them clean enough," Malamed said. "Number two, they demanded education for their children: it drove the landowners crazy. Number three, they established benificent societies immediately. Number four, they would not be buried in the normal Catholic cemeteries; they wanted their own land, separate, special. Today all those Portuguese are buried in a Catholic cemetery but they are buried together. In the beginning years, they married with their own community: they didn't marry outside their own community. They stuck togehter. "

Malamed said she remembers ticking off these things to her husband, and asking "what are we dealing with?" "They are all Jewish!" he replied. "I said 'That's right, they are all Jewish. They don't know it, but they are all Jewish."

Continuing to investigate, Malamed said she was told that there were "several families that lived in such fear of Spain and the consequences that could occur that they buried their dead in the Shinto cemetery, because the Shinto have certain pictographs on their gravestones and the Jews could put their Hebrew letters and no one would find it. 

"They hid themselves in the Shinto cemetery so they could put the Hebrew words so God could find them."

She was invited to speak about her findings at a Portuguese Hawaiian community meeting, and following her presentation, days later in some cases, people came to her and told their personal stories.

"For example, they all clean their houses on Friday," Malamed said. "Most of them take the dirt, tie it up, and put it in a bag and they throw it out on Monday or Tuesday because grandma always told them it is bad luck to throw it out on Friday. What is the bad luck? If you lived during the Inquistion and you were caught cleaning your house on Friday, they knew that you were Jewish because it was Shabbos and you were 'Judaized" so people learn to live and hide the dirt.

"Other people told me they learned that you can never, ever sweep the dirt outside the door on Friday; it can be swept out any other day of the week, but never on Friday."

She reported also that "many people told me that in the trunks of their houses are Old Testaments buried under blankets. People have been taken into the fields and told privately by their fathers that 'there is something about our family you don't know. We have a history that has been kept quiet all these years because we have been warned that if we cross the Catholic Church there will be repercussions."

Malamed said that a few families "got real brazen" and listed their ancestry on Hawaiian birth and wedding certificates as "Judeo" -- Jewish. "They actually said they were Jewish and I have copies of those papers."

Not everyone was thrilled to learn that Jews may be found in the high parts of their genealogical charts. In fact, Malamed said, "many of these people in this society are reluctant to know that they have Jewish roots. I have even had one person say to me: 'I wouldn't want to be Jewish -- weren't they slave traders?' "(A few Jews were, but most slave traders weren't Jewish). 

However "most of the people I have talked to have said 'how wonderful to be involved with such an ancient religion! What pride we have to share with our children!'"