Portugal, Salazar, and the Jews (review)

In his densely researched book, Portugal, Salazar, and the Jews, Avraham Milgram focuses on the gap between the rescue potential of Portugal, a European nation that, surprisingly, resisted rabid and rampant antisemitism, and the number of Jews who actually received permission to enter Portugal during World War II. Unique in its more open approach to Jews, it nevertheless hobbled Jewish immigration when Jews most needed it.

Milgram provides important background first. Starting with the Inquisition, he shows that, with few significant exceptions, Portugal began to accept Jews in the late eighteenth century, opening its gates to North African Jewish immigration in the nineteenth and Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth centuries. A very small and diverse Jewish community made up of Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and former crypto Jews thrived in the early twentieth century. As the absolutist state of the nineteenth century consolidated itself, its leaders disdained the Inquisition as anachronistic. "Antisemitism seems to have petered out in Portugal" (p. 43), as the state adopted a utilitarian and liberal attitude towards Jews. Indeed, the vast majority of rightists, monarchists, and anti-liberal circles marginalized racist antisemitism and pointed to intellectuals, liberals, and Freemasons as the new enemies. (Milgram does not explore if the Right assumed that Jews belonged to these stigmatized groups, or if Portuguese citizens understood these terms as code words for "Jews.")

A liberal Republic emancipated Jews fully in 1911. Conservatives aimed their ire at liberalism, not at the minuscule number of Jews in Portugal. Milgram insists, and is convincing on this point, that modern antisemitism failed "to establish even a toehold in Portugal" (p. 11) while it grew racist and virulent elsewhere in early twentieth-century Europe. Moreover, António de Oliveira Salazar, Portugal's dictator, rose to power in 1932 without antisemitic rhetoric or violence. Even Portuguese fascists (the Blue Shirts) eschewed the antisemitism that proponents of their ilk espoused in the north. They admired Hitler, yet did not oppose Jews coming to Portugal to escape his violent persecution. This is impressive. Still, readers may wonder about this lack of prejudice, especially since Salazar dreaded and stigmatized "communism," "republicanism," and "liberalism"—more code words for "Jews," at least among Portugal's neighbors. In addition, Milgram admits that the police harbored antisemitism, transposing their general dislike of foreigners onto Jews. But even as the police harassed and threatened Jews, they did not turn them over to the Germans.

Salazar and his minions performed a precarious balancing act before and during the war. At first they tried to please both sides, the Allies and the Germans. Starting in 1938 with the annexation of Austria, Portugal provided an important escape route for refugees to havens overseas. Then, in the summer of 1940 when the Germans overran France, a veritable flood of refugees— Jewish and non-Jewish—sought safety in Portugal. The largest number of Jews (13,000-15,000, according to Jewish sources) passed through Portugal, entering when, as Milgram notes, "the Germans called the shots" (p. 12). Milgram's statistics radically challenge long-established but fuzzy numbers ranging between Yehuda Bauer's estimate of 40,000 Jews passing through Portugal in 1940-41 (p. 61) and the American Jewish Yearbook's (1944) estimate of 100,000 mostly Jewish refugees. Still, Jewish sources cannot tell the whole story, since Jews also passed through Portugal on their own, without the assistance of Jewish organizations. Numbers aside, Milgram underlines that only in the summer of 1940 did the Portuguese ease their strictures and only for a few months.

Since most of these refugees hoped to flee Europe and since local business people welcomed them as consumers in the small resort towns where the government placed them (and where they were forbidden to compete with Portuguese businesses), why did Salazar insist on 30-day tourist visas and limit the number of refugees? Salazar feared all aliens, Jewish and non-Jewish, as potential communists and liberals who would undermine his regime. Before allowing entry, he demanded assurance...