Des marranes au Québec? Tensions identitaires et judéité dans Une Juive en Nouvelle-France de Pierre Lasry

This article analyzes the novel by Pierre Lasry, Esther: A Jewish Odyssey ([2000] 2006), which narrates the real-life story of Esther Brandeau, who arrived clandestinely in New France in 1738 under a false masculine identity and illegally as a Jew. She was deported back to France in 1739 because she refused to become a Catholic. The article demonstrates the continuity between her travels and those of her ancestors the Marranos, Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in 1498, and it considers the double geographical and spiritual dimension of her wanderings. Bearing the name of the Biblical queen Esther, who hid her Jewishness so as to save her people, Esther Brandeau represents the feminine dimension of Marranism. The linguistic intermingling whereby Hebrew and Portuguese words are mingled with the French epitomizes marranism as a “quartering” between the languages, representative of the “Jewish civilization moving towards modernity” (Lasry 2007). We will see that the novel reveals the unprecedented intergenerational dimension of a Marranism of origins underlying postmodern Québecois identity.