Abstract:
Brazilian Protestantism reveals a passion for Israel and Jewish symbols, which can be termed “Judeophilia” – the love for Jews. This phenomenon was verified in mani-festations of Christian Zionism, use by Protestants of Jewish symbols such as the Israeli flag, menorah, shofar and tallit, in addition to the celebration of Jewish festi-vals in churches of the most varied strands of Protestantism. Starting from the understanding that the love for Israel by Protestants derives from their love for the Bible, and that the Jewish and Protestant traditions have in this book the Holy Scriptures in common, the theoretical support to analyze the phenomenon is sought in philosophical hermeneutics, especially in Paul Ricoeur. Three variables are fundamental: the Bible, understood as a literary work full of significances, polyphonic in meanings and resonant in messages, which provides a potential for metaphors and imagination for readers of all times; the human experience in time, marked by its symbolic, liturgical and narrative character, which resolves the aporias of time and the chaos of existence through narrative organization both through history and fiction; and its final product, the individual and collective narrative identities, which produce and intertwine narratives to understand reality and themselves. In the analysis of the history of ancient Israel and the formation of the canon of the Hebrew Bible, as well as the history of Christianity and the formation of the canon of the Christian Bible, two distinct hermeneutical orientations are perceived, which drastically separated the two traditions: the Jewish, with identities based on the Talmud as an interpretation of the Torah; and the Christian, with identities based on Jesus Christ as a realization of the Hebrew Bible. Such a separation built up over time resulted in animosity and even violence by Christians against Jews. In recent history, the hermeneutical turn of Protestantism, in which the Bible gained the status of a single authority, accompanied by a radical literalist hermeneutic, Jews and Israel gained attention in terms of fulfilled eschatology - the already of the Kingdom of God - and still awaited--the not yet of the Kingdom of God. The return of the Jews to the Holy Land, as well as the organization of the State of Israel with a nationalist myth founded on biblical tradition, brought to the Protestants the apparent historical confirmation of their eschatological expectations both for the present and for the future – which explains the Judeophilia emerging only from the end of the 19th century. It is an intersection of Jewish and Protestant narratives producing the phenomenon of Judeophilia. However, as the communities of Judaism and Protestantism remain separate, it is a passion for an Israel imagined by Protestants according to their own hermeneutics of the Bible.
