41845358-Antisemitism

ANTISEMITIC MYTHS BLACKWASHED
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Portuguese New Christians fled to Portugal’s colonies, where commercial enterprises,
including the slave trade and slave plantation agriculture, beckoned.
Thus in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, several hundred Portuguese
New Christians, like other merchants seeking profit, engaged in the slave
trade and were active in the development of sugar plantations in Brazil that
depended on slave labor.
In 1630 the Dutch West India Company seized parts of Brazil from Portugal.
During the brief period of Dutch rule, from 1630 to 1654, New Christians
were permitted to revert back to Judaism, and some did, and Jews from
other lands were permitted to settle in Brazil. (Neither Portugal nor Spain
permitted self-professing Jews to settle in their colonies.) After the Portuguese
regained control of the territory, the Jews, about 650 in number, fled, some
going to the Dutch colony at New Amsterdam, which became New York in
1664; others settled on Caribbean islands where they brought with them skills
in managing tropical plantations. The Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil hunted
down lapsed New Christians, some of whom were sent back to Lisbon to face
execution.
During the brief period of Dutch rule, when Jews were tolerated, some
30,000 slaves were imported from Africa; Jewish involvement in this traffic
consisted primarily of buying slaves at auctions and selling them to the owners
of sugar plantations. As middlemen, Jewish settlers were actively involved in
the slave trade for the brief time that they dwelled in Brazil. But the number of
slaves they bought and resold to planters constitutes only a pittance when
measured against the huge number of slaves imported into Brazil over three
centuries. The great bulk of Africans, over 3 million, were brought to Brazil in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when there was virtually no Jewish
presence in either Portugal or Brazil. During this period the trade was controlled
by Old Christians and descendants of New Christians. There is little
doubt that in the ten and more generations that had passed since the initial
conversions, virtually all of these people had become totally Catholic, with no
ties at all to Jewish rituals or laws, much less to Jewish communities. No one
considers them Jews except the authors of Secret Relationship, who, more stringent
than the Nazis in reckoning Jewish descent, have adopted the peculiar
racist formula that if someone had a Jewish ancestor three hundred years ago,
that person was still Jewish, even though he or she identified fully with Christianity,
neither maintained nor sought links to Jewish law or rituals, knew no
Jews—there were none in Portugal in the nineteenth century and only a handful
of recent immigrants from eastern Europe in Brazil by the late nineteenth
century—and most likely shared a Catholic bias toward them.