A cerimônia da hena: as cores da etnicidade

Abstract

This paper is an exercise which aims to analyse in a comparative way aspects of the construction of identities of Jews from Morocco. It focuses on one group which began to immigrate to the Amazon Region attracted by The Rubber Cycle (1860-1910), and on another group of Moroccan Jews who immigrated to Israel in 1950, victims of reprisals in Arabic countries due the creation of the State of Israel. Through the analysis of the pre-nuptial hena ceremony, which has been widely adopted by Jews from Arabic countries, where the couple and guests have their hands dyed by hena to scare off the evil eye, we have the opportunity to glimpse a controversial issue related to Rabbinic Judaism, and how those two Moroccan Jewish identities are constructed and updated, as well as how this ceremony helps to demarcate the Moroccan Jews sense of ethnic identity in Israeli society in relation to other Jewish identities. The paper also explores how this ceremony, which had been forgotten, was recovered by the Moroccan Jewish community of Belém, in the northern Brazilian state of Pará, as a diacritical sign that forms the identity of Moroccan Jews in Amazonia.