Branca Dias between fact and fiction

religious tolerance in colonial Brazil through the eyes of Dias Gomes

Abstract

In the middle of the 16th century, Brazil is covered by a myriad of creeds that intermingle all the time; the dubiety, the tenuous oscillation between orthodoxy and syncretism, characterizes then the multifaceted popular religiosity. As the sacred was often intermingled with the profane, the beginning of the inquisitorial action in Brazil marks a great tension between the rigid ecclesiastic orthodoxy and the fluid local religiosity, composed of multiple gradients of Catholicism, among which is the crypto-Jew - the one who, although baptized in the Catholic faith, professed Judaism in secret. Transposing History to fiction, Dias Gomes, in O santo inquérito, turns to eighteenth-century Paraíba to narrate the heresies of Branca Dias, a descendant of crypto-Jews denounced to ecclesiastical justice for practicing acts contrary to morality. Thus, we seek to understand to what extent the play approaches the persecution of the Judaizing heresy as factual truth. To this end, the methodology used includes bibliographic review and research on civil and ecclesiastical legislation. At the end of this essay, it is noted that the author, although not concerned with historical background, outlines the inquisitorial system, in which the defendant is reduced to a mere verifying object of the real truth.