Dead Rabbi Performs Miracles for Christians of Manaus

The details of Rabbi Shalon Emmanuel Muyal’s mission and death in the Amazon remain obscure, but that’s nothing compared to the mystery surrounding his afterlife. Local Catholics have named him the “Santo Judeu Milagreiro de Manaus” (Saint Jewish Miracle Worker of Manaus). His tomb receives regular visits from Christians who attribute magic to his spirit. The rabbi’s draw is so strong that local Jewish community leaders felt compelled to refuse a request from his nephew, who happened to be a member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to have his remains removed for reburial in Israel.

Nobody can say for sure why Rabbi Muyal set off from Morocco to the Brazilian Amazon in 1908. The most likely story seems to be that he was sent by the Grand Rabbi of Morocco to touch base with the rainforest faithful. Moroccan Jews, mostly descendants of refugees forced from the Iberian Peninsula by the Inquisition, began emigrating to the Amazon in the early 19th century. A second wave followed with the rubber boom around the turn of the century.

Muyal began his Amazon expedition - like everyone else back then - not far from the mouth of the Amazon River in the city of Belém and worked his way up river. By 1910 he had traversed the nearly 1,000 miles to Manaus. Then a city of 50,000, Manaus had been developing at an “almost North American” pace in the preceding decades of the rubber boom, according to the German anthropologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg, who had passed through town a few years before the rabbi.

In his book Two Years Among the Indians, Koch-Grünberg warned of the “dangerous ‘Manaus fever,’ that nearly every year kills a quantity of foreigners.” Rabbi Muyal caught something, probably yellow fever, and died on March 10, 1910. Manaus didn’t have a Jewish cemetery until the 1920s, so he was buried amidst the gentiles in the Săo Joăo Batista Municipal Cemetery.

Death by yellow fever is a pretty gruesome affair. It is characterized by jaundice, causing the whites of the eyes and the skin to turn yellow, and black vomit, the dark coloring due to blood. By all accounts, nobody really wanted to hang out at the rabbi’s deathbed. Nobody except a woman named Cota Israel, who faithfully nursed Muyal until he passed away.

After the rabbi’s death, she began to display a knack for helping people iron out kinks – muscle pulls, twisted ankles and knees, fractures and back problems. “Just a common woman, she began to treat people as would a physical therapist today,” said Isaac Dahan, a medical doctor and religious leader of Manaus’ Jewish community. When asked how she did it, Cota Israel would say that she’d been blessed by Rabbi Muyal.

There’s no record of when the “Santo Rabino” himself was first credited with miracles, but members of Manaus’ Jewish community born in the 1930s remember hearing stories about him when they were children. Dozens of thankful beneficiaries have attached plaques to the rabbi’s tomb. Most of them simply announce a “graça alcançada” (miracle performed). None specifies the details of the miracle. Most are not dated. The oldest that does reads July 18, 1975.

A few years later, around 1980, a member of the Israeli parliament named Eliahu Muyal learned from a friend of the miracle-performing rabbi in Brazil. Muyal determined that the mysterious corpse belonged to his long-lost uncle. He sent a letter to the Amazonas Israelite Committee in Manaus asking whether the remains could be sent to Israel for reburial. After some soul searching, the community leaders regretfully denied his request. Said Dahan: “How could we? He’d become a saint.”

Visiting the Santo Rabbi at the Manaus Cemetery

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