The medieval world in cordel: the judeo-christian myth of the Wandering Jew in the popular poetry of Manoel Pereira Sobrinho

Abstract

The Wandering Jew myth dates back to the Middle Ages and spread through orality and writing, always with the meaning of hatred of Jews. It began to appear recurrently in varied artistic genres, but when it enters the literatura de cordel (chapbooks), it takes on a perspective closer to the medieval one. The relationship of this myth with literatura de cordel permeates this study’s subject, which is a literary-historical reflection with the aim of recognizing the permanence of the Wandering Jew myth and its diffusion in Brazil. The study proposes an analytical-interpretative reading of the work O judeu errante by Manoel Pereira Sobrinho (1958). It was developed at the intersection of literature theory with cultural history guided by the premise that literature can represent the way people thought of the world, themselves, their values, prejudices, fears, etc. Thus, the literary work is a privileged historical source for the understanding of symbolic universe of myth in literary forms, without which its secular permanence and circulation would be uncertain. Similarly to the myth, literatura de cordel dates back to the Middle Ages Iberia and explores themes that have entered the conceptual repertoire incorporated into the Wandering Jew myth since medieval times. This is the case of themes such as usury and deicide, which brings to light the image of wandering of the character in Brazilian literature. Such literature is inscribed in the production of poets from the northeast of Brazil with a representation of the Wandering Jew shaping the building of the cordelista’s imaginary: popular culture and aesthetic-thematic tradition. Therefore, the poem analyzes in this study is engendered as a significant element of a nationality: the culture, the memory and the identity of a people.